As a Mandalayan, mangoes are always in my heart wherever in the world I am. When I see the first mangoes of the season in open markets or at road side shops in my home town, my heart beat always races. My mum would immediately buy these for almost any reason... prayer fruits, family treats and gifts. The mango season in Burma runs between April and July. There are various types of delicious mangoes and it's difficult to choose my favourite one among them. They are all individually having unique qualities such as flavour, texture, shape, region (where they belong to) and of course name.
One of the first class local mangoes is called Sein-Ta-Lone (Rough Diamond). It is a naturally mutated specie, its birth place being Pe-Kin village near Kyaukse in Mandalay state. Sein-Ta-Lone is famous for its sweet-flavoured, soft texture with delightful aroma. He is well known in Burmese mango markets and is a wonderful contributor to the rice pot of mango growers from the bank of Myitnge river (The Little River). There are also other beautiful and tasty mangoes like Shwe-Hinn-Thar, Aung-Din and Ma-Chit-Su etc locally.
A few mangoes with natural fruity sourness are not as popular as those good old mangoes. They are imported to the pickle trade and go to make mango pickle salad, another mouth watering dish for all Burmese. I was slightly disappointed after trying mangoes from India and Pakistan, the world's largest mango producers, for the quality of fruit. And I won't even count those rough, off-yellow and sour mangoes (I'm not sure where they come from) which you can buy in British supermarkets.
Back home, we eat mango in several ways as the fruit or the side dish with rice or the dessert topping or the preserved sweets etc. I also like the immature green mangoes dipping in chilly flaked fish sauce. Fresh sweet mango matches with pork curry and if you dare to eat mango with the deep fried chopped reptile (Pa-Dat), you will be transported to a heaven that you never knew existed.
Mangoes also remind me of my late grandma, a veteran Mandalayan who knows a lot about this versatile fruit. Her favorite method of preparation was to peel the skin off the mango and to make the slices off were magic.
The kids are always excited to get the stones from cut mangoes as a bonus. Have you ever extracted the juice and slight flesh from mango stone? It is still a fun for me every time I de-flesh a mango.
No matter how harshly the monsoon winds get rip the immature mangoes from the trees or how many hundreds of mango lorries are been driven across the Chinese border to be exported, Burmese still have a chance to eat local mangoes properly and cheaply.
(This post is dedicated to my mum who collected the facts, took the pictures of mangoes and wrote the beautiful piece in Burmese. This is loosely based on her essay. )
