Unripe mango

I have been traveling a lot this last week or so, mainly on trains between Berlin and Frankfurt (twice) and Frankfurt and Weimar. The Siedel family met in Weimar: cousins from all parts of the Federal Republic and from Canada. We stayed together in a hotel, with a cultural excursion to Goethe's house and the Anna Amalia library. And of course we ate together.

In Weimar at lunch I had a Thüringer Bratwurst, potato salad, and a vegetable salad. This is the German equivalent of a hamburger and fries in the US. Something quintessentially safe in almost any restaurant. The cooks were very generous with the sausage and it filled my meat quota several times over. I should not have eaten it all, but eating is sometimes hard to stop. For supper I wanted only vegetables and chose the “fitness salad”, in no small part because it included mango.

Is there anyone who does not love mango? It is smooth, sweet, juicy, and has an aroma that takes one to exotic places. I learned how to extract the fruit from a mango when watching a Hercule Parroit episode on the PBS (BBC) Mystery series decades ago. The trick is to cut the fruit with a sharp knife along the flat side of the stone, and then to scoop the soft fruit out with a large spoon. The spoon is hard enough to cut the fruit's flesh but soft enough not to cut the rubbery skin. The flesh comes off in large chunks and I expected soft, fresh, sweet mango in the salad. Instead the salad had small bits of apple. I like apple, but was disappointed. I ate it anyway and soon realized that the bits of apple were really very unripe mango slices. What were the cooks thinking? Perhaps they have no clue about mango, or perhaps they reasoned that mango was on the menu and they had a mango in the kitchen, so they put it in regardless of its condition. I suspect the latter.

I am writing the text of this blog on the train from Frankfurt and have just had supper in the dining car. Often I have the Nürnberger Würste for the same reason that I had the Thüringer Bratwurst in Weimar (it is safe), but sausage again was more than I could contemplate. I tried the chili con carne instead – with some trepidation, since it is not a German dish. The sauce was rich with tomato taste and even a modest (very modest) hit of some form of chili spice. Still, chili without the carne would have been better. People eat too much meat, and growing animals for meat has environmental consequences.

At lunch today I had mango lassi at an Indian restaurant. It is a mango yogurt drink. Elke orders it regularly. I should more often.I have a mango ripening in the window. Perhaps I will make some when the mango is truly ready.