A Taste of Mango

A French/Venezuelan friend once scoffed when told her I ate the best mangos of my life in London. I arrived in England right after the calendar flipped into 1986. After surviving a winter as wet and gray as you would expect a London winter to be, I found mangos an unexpected pleasure of the English spring. In May, on days when the sun appeared, I circulated among the parks between my apartment and the school where I was studying, searching for suitable places to sit and read. I ate a mango almost every day, usually purchased at a fruit stand on Bayswater Road. I knew that England’s non-tropical climate does not encourage cultivation of any mango variety. I attributed the abundance of excellent mangos less to any British taste for exotic fruit than to the enormous population of Londoners with South Asian roots. While not as fresh as a mango or banana you can pick right off the tree—London may be paradise for some things but it’s not South Pacific—London mangos were many steps above mangos available in the U.S. supermarkets I frequented in the mid-1980s.

Deborah is allergic to mango: a tragedy not of birth but of exposure. She attributes it to two possible sources. She spent some time picking mangos on a kibbutz in Israel in the early 1990s. You wear gloves when picking mangos but apparently you still get sap on your arms. She also drank a lot of mango juice during two extended stints in Egypt, both in the 1990s. Apparently mango juice is often made by squeezing fruit still in the skin, which introduces the stuff on the skin into the juice. After her allergic reactions began she learned that the skin of mango contains irritants not unrelated to poison ivy. She suspects the combined exposure to these irritants from fruit picking and juice drinking made her susceptible allergic reactions. We plan to test her immunity by cutting mangos carefully, away from the skin, and seeing whether she can safely eat the flesh. Since we have not yet conducted this experiment we live in a mango free household.

Our nineteen month old daughter has yet to meet a fruit she will not devour. She had not been eating solid food for very long when her day-care teachers nicknamed her Fruit Bat. Last summer, on the beach, when she was eight months old, she ate an entire plum out of her mother’s hand. Among her first fifty words were distinct words for blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry. She will eat as many of any of them as you put in front of her, then ask for more. Over the recent fourth of July weekend she and a pair of two two-year old twins demolished half a watermelon. But, until a few weeks ago, she had never eaten mango.

Before spending two months in Egypt in 2009, I had never lived in a mango producing country. The produce in Egypt was one of the country’s main pleasures. Every day we ate bananas our fruit vendor cut off the bunch with a curved, deadly looking knife, the kind plotting Arabs hid in their robes in Orientalist movies. The melons were stunning: sweet, juicy, sticky. During our last weeks in Cairo we ate peaches and nectarines by the kilo. We had to eat them quickly because, in summer heat, the distance from ripe to rotten was sometimes measured in hours. Sadly, we left before the onset of mango season.



In June, 2010, we stayed for a few nights in Tel Aviv at a suite hotel two blocks east of the Mediterranean. We were a short walk from the Old Port area, a former industrial area that’s been converted into the best waterfront development I’ve ever seen. More to the point, we were four blocks south of my favorite fish restaurant on the planet.

We wanted a suite because, since we started travelling with a small child graced with predictable sleeping habits—habits we’ve worked hard to cultivate—we’ve discovered that hotel rooms present certain social limitations. We’ve stayed in some lovely hotels in New York, Alexandria, London, Los Angeles, Boise and St. Louis, when Hannah ranged in age from five to eighteen months. After she has gone to sleep, our choice of activities has encompassed the following: reading, working on laptops, quietly talking, sleeping. In London, when Hannah was six months old, we carried in Indian food and ate several courses a few feet from her portable play yard. In Alexandria we had a balcony. After Hannah was asleep we sat on our balcony, faced the Mediterranean, and watched the sun go down. Room service delivered mediocre pasta and Egypt’s own Stella beer. At some point room service called and told us they wanted their bottle opener back. At a conference hotel in Los Angeles we had a balcony where we could eat and talk at something like normal volume. One night my brother brought in Mexican food. Another night we ordered Persian take-out and invited a friend to sit on our balcony and eat with us.

When we’ve stayed in hotel rooms with more than one room, preferably including a door that closes, we’ve managed to have something like a normal evening. In the cottage-like room we rented at an inn in Santa Barbara, the TV was mounted on the wall of the bedroom, right over the play-yard; if we’d wanted to watch TV we would have been out of luck. I drove to the taco stand known to be Julia Child’s favorite and hauled back a selection of house specialties to eat at the tiny kitchen table. The suite where we stayed during our second shift in Los Angeles was long and skinny: it had no balcony but it had a bedroom separated from the living room and kitchen by a few steps and a curtain. Behind the bedroom, the farthest possible distance from the kitchen, was a mirrored dressing room—with a door—where we set up the play yard.

Our suite in north Tel Aviv would have been a pretty nice one-bedroom apartment. We had a side-view of the Mediterranean. Two historical black and white photos of the neighborhood, blown up to wall size, hung on the walls. One, dated from the 1930s, showed a caravan of camels in front of the power plant that still stands just north of the port. Over the couch hung a 1950s photo that showed the massive, international style Tel Aviv Hilton, a few blocks to the south, under construction. The furnishings were modern, including a black leather Mies van der Rohish couch that acquired white smeary hand-prints—surprisingly hard to wipe off—when we slathered Hannah with sunscreen.

One night we were invited for dinner with friends at their apartment a cab ride away. That left us two nights when we could eat grilled fish and many, many salads at Benny the Fisherman. Take-out food was not on the menu this time. Early in the first dinner the server set down a wine bottle filled with water on our table. We were amazed when eighteen month old Hannah pointed to the bottle and squawked “wine”; we were embarrassed when she made it clear, to us and the server, that she wanted some.



At our hotel, breakfast was served on the rooftop restaurant, a spa-like setting with views as spectacular as any I have ever enjoyed with my breakfast. (The other competitor was the hotel in Athens from which we could see the Parthenon while drinking don’t-call-it-Turkish-coffee.) Breakfast was laid out in an air-conditioned dining area. About half of the outside tables were under a canopy. We sat outside at a proper table with chairs (and a high chair). Arrayed between the tables and the terrace’s edge were groupings of loungier bambooish love seats and chairs with big upholstered cushions arranged around coffee tables, all laid out on panelled bamboo flooring, as if we were in a sauna or in Tokyo. The terrace wrapped around the inside portion of the restaurant, affording views of the Mediterranean on two sides or views of the city, depending on which way you faced. This rooftop terrace was clearly designed to be a party space as well, although partying after dark was not in the cards for us this time.

Breakfasts at our hotel in Jerusalem were scheduled for people who would be getting on tour buses (mostly to walk in Jesus’s steps, as far as we could gather). At exactly 10 am the piano player wrapped up whatever Cole Porter or Barry Manilow song he was interpreting, closed the lid over the ivories, and walked out of the restaurant. By 10:30 the staff had gathered up any remaining food and left us alone in the room, lingering over whatever fruit Hannah was still sampling. Breakfasts at our Tel Aviv hotel were scheduled for people on their way to the beach. I can’t remember whether breakfast ended at 10:30 or 11:00 because we never closed that joint down.

The price of a hotel room in Israel generally includes a buffet style breakfast: in my experience, the displays tend to be impressive. You expect cheeses, salads, fresh vegetables, smoked fish, fruit and possibly eggs in addition to cereal and various baked goods served next to butter, cream cheese, honey and jam. You never get meat of any kind (certainly not sausage or bacon) because hotels are generally kosher and kosher breakfast is always dairy. Certainly, one expects variations. Some places have more salads. Some have bagels that resemble New York bagels. The choice of cheeses varies. Some hotels are more expensive and their breakfasts reflect this. When we scoped out the breakfast buffet at around 9:00 am on our first morning, we were generally pleased; our one disappointment was the fruit plate. It seemed pretty picked over: some sad looking watermelon, fragments of grapefruit, a few lonely sections of orange, a sparse handful of grapes.

When we arrived in Tel Aviv we had just come from a kibbutz where we had spent two nights visiting friends. On the kibbutz, we had eaten fantastic watermelon: sweeter and wetter and colder than any watermelon I can remember, and I have loved watermelon my whole life. Perhaps it had something to do with the heat. Perhaps it was the company. Perhaps it was vacation air in the Mediterranean. Perhaps it had to do with our proximity to the place where the watermelon was grown, in soil cultivated with socialism. (The kibbutz we visited, like all surviving kibbutzim, is on a decades-long march from communalism to privatization). The sad slices of watermelon at the rooftop buffet were a disappointing come-down when memories of kibbutz watermelon were still fresh on our palates.

Then we saw the plate of fruit delivered to the man sitting at one of the upholstered lounge set-ups. We had noticed him earlier: a man in his thirties or forties in shorts, sandals (like everyone else in Israel), a pale yellow polo shirt. Big belly, black hair a little unkempt, pulled back in a ponytail. Sunglasses on top of his head. He walked around the terrace like he owned the place. If you’d seen him in Santa Monica or on King’s Road in the 1970s, you might have pegged him as an aging rock star. Now we know how old rock stars can become. He sat with a woman in a tight t-shirt and big sunglasses: we assumed she was his wife because a toddler sat with them too. He chatted with someone else in his lounge area, shook hands with someone at another table. A waiter delivered a spectacular plate of fruit to the aging rock star and another just like it to the table where the rock star had stopped in for a handshake visit. The plate was black ceramic. A watermelon was cut into slices, arranged by height. A grapefruit was sculpted into sections. Bunches of grapes sat here and there. A mango was cut away from the skin in a checkerboard pattern so you could nibble the chunks of fruit off the skin with a minimum of labor.

By the time Deborah and I saw the fruit walk by we had commented to the wait staff about the pathetic fruit on display inside and asked whether they planned to replenish it. Breakfast was scheduled to last at least another hour. The plate of lusciousness sent us into a speculative frenzy. Are these guys ordering off the menu? If so, where’s the menu? Is there an extra charge for the stunning fruit plate? Our speculation grew more frenzied after the rock star and his wife and child got up and left a few minutes after the fruit arrived. The fruit was virtually untouched, as we saw when the waiter walked the plate back towards the kitchen. We envisioned a tragic outcome. Were they going to throw this away? Would they put it on display in the buffet area? How could we get in on some of this fruit action?

Around this time a server came over to tell us the fruit plate at the buffet had been replenished. Deborah has a habit I consider peculiar: sometimes if she’s in a country where she speaks the language fluently, she will still deal with some service personnel in English. I have encouraged her to use her impressive language skills on these occasions because things do get lost in translation. Once she ordered beer in English at a restaurant in central Brussels. (Admittedly, it’s hard to know what language to use in Belgium). Although the politics of French versus Dutch are touchy, the waiter would certainly have understood if she’d ordered in French, and she would not have ordered something that sounded pretty interesting—“sherry beer”—if she had known the waiter was actually saying “cherry beer.” “Cerise” and “xér`es” sound much more different than “cherry” and “sherry.” The cherry beer was awful. She had to re-order.

When Deborah asked the Tel Aviv server about the fruit plates that had paraded by our table, she switched to Hebrew when it was clear the server didn’t understand what Deborah was asking. (Deborah did point out that English might be more appropriate with some of the hotel staff because most of them were Russian). Even though I couldn’t understand what Deborah was saying, I knew from intonation and body language and experience that it included phrases like these : “thank you for putting out more fruit… we’ll go inside in a minute… we’re just curious…it looked so good… we wondered if there was a special menu…” and so on. The server left saying she’d ask the manager, apparently unaware that any special fruit plates existed.

By the time the manager came over to our table the aging rock star had returned to his table, without his wife and child. The waiter brought back his fruit plate and the rock star ate the mango with relish. For the manager Deborah repeated her performance, this time in English, with my assistance. The manager told us what was available at the buffet. Deborah said we were just curious about the special fruit plates we had seen. “There was just one. Well two,” said the manager.

“We saw them deliver one to the man at that table.”

“He owns the hotel.”

Sometimes when someone walks around like he owns the place, it’s because he owns the place.

The manager told us there was nothing on the special plate that wasn’t also on the buffet table. Except, he admitted, for the mango. “They aren’t in season yet.” Like a good restaurant manager, he then offered to bring us some mango, even out of season. At first we demurred—“I’m allergic… it’s too much trouble… they’re not in season yet…”—but then we admitted that I, at least, would love to have some mango. A few minutes later we had a small rectangular plate on which the cook had arrayed chunks of mango and a few double-forked toothpicks.

At first Hannah was only interested in the toothpicks. Then she let me put a piece of mango in her mouth, just for fun. As is usually the case when she’s trying something new, she put it in her mouth, tasted but did not bite, and took it out. When she realized it was fruit and tasted good, she ate it and was ready for more. We spent the rest of the meal passing toothpicks and pieces of mango back and forth. According to Deborah, who watched, it was just as cute as it sounds.