The delicious Mancurad mango of Goa

The incomparable Mancurad mango A decade or more ago, a huge mango tree which stood in our property in Goa, fell. Lucky for us it fell across the boundary wall, smashing it but saved the house which could have been a casualty. Those were the ancient giants of the village, who need almost ½ an acre to spread themselves and to pick the fruit,was a terrible and torturous exercise. Torturous because of the fire ants that nest in its leaves and can leave one writhing in pain with their bites. My young sons were in Goa then and had to get labour to remove the massive giant.

The baby Mancurad graft tree standing on the house wall But I always wanted my very own Mancurad mango tree, as the mangoes I had tasted from my husbands family home in Candolim were delicious. Far superior to the Alphonso that people carry on about. Stringless and meaty, the orange flesh was enough to send us, into paroxysms of delight. So when I was told about a famous goan grafter named Anthony, I phoned him for two grafts. He came in his white rattle trap Omni van to the house in Pilerne, to inspect where I was going to plant his babies. It was fun taking his advice and filling up the three feet deep holes with grass and leaves to two feet depth and then bringing in natural compost as a base before the trees were planted.

Anthony the master grafter delivered them from Britona. Then Bonny and Steve raced up to Porvorim and brought in plastic netting and enclosed the baby trees with it, to keep them safe. He advised filling one of my Dads old plastic jerry cans which could hold 10 liters of water and let it leak out slowly over the week, from a small crack in it. Got the caretaker all excited and ready to do his bidding, as he comes from a rural background in Maharastra.

Each baby tree was safely planted with plastic netting around it. A true blue Goan knows that the Mancurad is the top mango variety for us Goans. It has a long history of cultivation and is known exclusively as a table fruit. Infact just outside our dining room in the Goa homestead is a mancurad tree belonging to the neighbour, which has given us grief for decades. The fruit crash through the tiles of the kitchen much to our annoyance and rage and for years my Dad would rant and rave and do nothing about it. The whole village knew of his annoyance, but the fruit kept crashing through. The neighbour would just feign horror when she was told to trim the tree. Finally after Dad’s passing I employed a man to shin up the tree and hack off the over- hanging branches around twilight and spirit them away. We have stopped paying a king’s ransom in replacing tiles each season and sometimes even rafters holding up the roof. When mango season arrives in India, across the country, mago lovers are giddy with rapture over the arrival of the fake Hapoos ( Alphonso) from the coastlines of Maharashtra and Gujarat. But in Goa, the waiting game isn’t for that pale approximation of the original Alphonso, which is left for tourists and others. We goans wait for our Mancurads!

A box of the delicious mancurads worth a kings ransom It has been this way for centuries, and as I age have become particular about the variety of mango I consume. The whole of Goa, from the Ghats to the Arabian Sea, comprises a mere sliver of the vast Subcontinent, but has developed more than 100 varieties of mangoes ever since the Jesuits introduced modern grafting techniques in the 16th century, says info off the net. Within just a couple of decades of the influx of European ideas of grafting, the results of the experiments had become acclaimed, treasured and celebrated across Goa. The Hilario ( original name of Mancurad) was propagated and every tree is derived from a famous progenitor from the garden of Hilario Fernandes in the lovely village of Siolim. The arrival of the annual mango tribute, to the Portuguese colonisers in the court in Lisbon, soon became a celebration, that brought all other proceedings to standstill. Boxes of the fruit went as a gift from Goa to the Emperor who was pleased with the gift.

Mancurads on sale in the local Panjim market. We also know about the hopelessly mango-obsessed Emperor Akbar. He encouraged the presence of Jesuits from Goa in his court for decades because of their expertise in fruiticulture – eventually he planted an orchard of 100,000 grafts in Darbangha. His equally mango-besotted grandson Shah Jahan spent state resources to carve out a special “fast track” route from the Konkan to Delhi, to ensure rapid supply of the fruit through the summer months. As a result, Goa mangoes were established as an essential tool of Portuguese diplomacy. Crates of Alphonso mangoes were prized tribute in all the kingdoms of the Deccan, and especially in the Maratha court.

The best way to eat the flesh of the mango cheek! In 1792, the Portuguese ambassador to Pune, wrote to the Governor of Goa, advising strict restriction on mango imports to all the territories which are now Maharashtra, in order to ensure that the Estado da India Portuguesa’s treasury of Goan fruit remained rare and precious, thus retaining its fabled allure. In a few decades, the Peshwas developed mango ambitions of their own says the net, and embarked on planting millions of Goa-derived Alphonso mango grafts throughout the Konkan. It is the hardy, hybrid descendants of these fruits, which now flood India and the rest of the world as Hapoos. But even as they are prized everywhere else, these undoubtedly decent and adequately tasty fruits are not eaten with any enthusiasm in Goa. All these different varieties are enjoyable, but the objects of maximum desire and longing, the fruits that strike the deepest chord in every Goan soul are the luscious Hilario, or better known as the peerlessly magnificent Mancurad.

The prices which can be compared of the different varieties of mangoes Try both fruit like a connoisseur of mangos. First take a ripe Mancurad mango, and slice it open next to its Ratnagiri Hapoos equivalent. Now close your eyes and taste them. The size and colour of the two fruits could well be similar, maybe even identical. The consistency will likely be more or less the same. But the cinnamon-caramel-honeyed depths of flavour of the Goan fruit will bedazzle and overwhelm, and so its rival will immediately start to taste perceptibly watered down, and sadly unable to compare.