Green mango rice

Lean into the tart – there is joy to be found in sour things

Hello, my name is Apoorva Sripathi and I’m a writer and editor. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for tart, savoury raw mango rice and I hope you’ll give it a go. Below the recipe introduction is also a form for sending in questions for my new ‘shelf help’ column. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you!

There is so much sweetness around us – and equally bitterness – so I’m here to make a case for sourness. Take the green mango (also raw mango), which is often overlooked in favour of the ripe mango, that luscious fragrant gold which makes everyone lose their minds (rightfully so). But the green mango holds its own. Often consumed as a snack with something spicy, like chilli and salt, green mangoes also find home in salads; they are cooked along with lentils or coconut and yoghurt, added to rasam, boiled and blended into a summer drink, or simply boiled with jaggery and tempered with spices to make pachadi, a relish that welcomes in some of our new years.

(raw) Mangoes are more than fruits for those of who grew up with their unending influence in our lives – in consuming and writing about them, we are ourselves available for consumption; fruits such as this are culture but also syncretism for south Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, East and South East Asian countries. Ingredients like the mango sometimes become a stand-in for identity and self, especially for those who find themselves untethered. There is so much bad poetry and literature employing mangoes, the tropes as cloying as the fruits themselves that it is hard to imagine anything but fatigue involving these fruits.

But before I learned to love ripe, luscious, radiant mangoes, I loved raw green tart mangoes, their thick bitter skins emitting the smell of honey and grass – I yearned for a perfume to be distilled from them, along with the leathery and musky vetiver husks that were bundled in a pot of our drinking water, the smell of roasting coffee, and blooming jasmine. I love green mango so much that I went on record to say that it was better than its ripe counterpart; today I’d say each has its place but I’d also be lying if I said that I did not possess a fraction more of affection for green mangoes. Hence this green mango rice finds its way in my newsletter this week.

There are ways to make this rice dish, based on how one’s family does it – my mother, for example, prefers grating the raw mango and frying it in an abundance of south Indian sesame oil with tempered spices, mixing it with boiled and cooled rice, and scattering many handfuls of fried peanuts on top. I like to grind the grated mango with chillies, coconut, peanuts, and sesame (what the Kannadigas call mavinakayi chitranna)¹, fry the paste till it thickens, and add boiled and cooled rice to it. I don’t have my dream perfume yet, but till then I have this rice.

‘shelf help’ announcement

Following up from the last free newsletter, I’m launching a new column called ‘shelf help’ for paid subscribers, where people can write in asking for help with their cooking questions (or writing or art). I’ll be happy to answer these questions and point you in (hopefully) the right direction. The answers will be available for paid subscribers only but if you leave me your name and mailing address in the form, I can send the response to you over email.

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