pure and delicious: Mango

mango heaven

living in mango heaven

the first mango I've seen in my live was when I came to Grenada for the first time, at the age of seven. I was born in Switzerland and was more familiar with apples and cherries: this terribly sweet and sticky fruit with no way to eat it decently was not my taste at all.
It took me almost 20 more years and many trips to Grenada to appreciate and to start loving the mango passionately!

from left to right: Peach - Ceylon - Julie - Palvi - Imperial

although... there is not THE mango, as much as there is not THE apple. I don't know how many different varieties of mangos are existing in Grenada or in the whole world... we are lucky to have a few of the best sorts of mangos on our land: Graham, Peach, Julie, Imperial, Palvi, Ceylon, ... and of course we have mango long and mango thin, two of the old sorts, the ones where you'll need a whole role of dental floss after eating them to get your teeths ready for the next smile again.

One of the best mangoes I've ever eaten was the "mango bouff": it is very juicy, light, a little bit on the sour side, and it's huge! You wouldn't find this mango in a shop here in Grenada and certainly not in the supermarkets in Switzerland, it's the kind of forgotten species that tastes perfectly but would not fit into any scheme of standardized fruits. The mango bouff is growing on my cousin's lands, the tree is shading the young cocoa trees and the fruits are quenching the workmens thurst.
I was wondering if the mango bouff's name is coming from the French who owned the island between 1674 and 1763? "bouffer" is a french word for eating, or eating a lot:

I could certainly eat a lot of the mango bouff, of any kind of mango, they are so pure and delicious!

We use mangoes in many different ways in our kitchen. We cook them into jam, sirup, chutney, we use them in desserts or we add an exotic taste to a fish with mangoes.