January 2024
After primary school in Sri Lanka I would go with my bothers and classmates to the achcharu woman sitting just outside the school grounds. We would pool what was left of our tuck shop money to buy a parcel of mango achcharu wrapped in newspaper, the sauce of which threatened to collapse the parcel onto the gravel roadway if we were slow in devouring its contents.
An achcharu is a fresh pickle, in this case of slices of ripe mango in a sauce of vinegar, sugar, chilli and salt. Taste memories of that have been swirling around my tongue as I revel in the first good crop of mangoes in 20 years from the tree in my yard. There are enough this season for me, the possums and the birds, the latter two of which are welcome to the fruit higher up the several metres to which the tree has grown. I’ll be picking my share while they are still green and making a sweet mango chutney with some and a green mango pickle.
My culinary thoughts having been hijacked by mangoes I followed where they led. This article is where I ended up: a look at the culinary history of the mango at the Anglo Australian table.
