Muristek
Nigel Slater’s recipes for mango and carrot salad, rum snaps, and mango fool
Celebrate mango season with sweet treats and crunchy salads
There is a wide, shallow dish on the kitchen counter, home to a succession of seasonal fruits that need ushering towards ripeness. Figs whose skin will tear should one brush against another; apricots with rust-coloured freckles and, in late summer, plums that will bruise and weep if piled hugger-mugger in a punnet. It is here I ripen avocados and paw paws and look after fat-bottomed pears until they reach their brief moment of perfection. During May and June, the bowl is a safe harbour for mangoes – small, smooth and heavy with juice, their skin as yellow as custard, their flesh as bright and cheerful as a bunch of marigolds. As they become ready, and against all the rules, I chill them in the fridge. A cold mango dripping with juice is an early summer treat beyond measure. Round or oval and as tender as a bruise, few fruits are as pleasing to the touch. They feel like a bar of soap worn smooth through much use, and the smell – sweet, honeyed, a little cloying – hangs on the warm summer air in the kitchen. A few come in fancy dress, festooned with tinsel the colour of Quality Street wrappings, which I leave in place. When the fruits are ripe, they might offer us a teasing bead of nectar.
I eat them as they come, sliced with a razor-sharp pocketknife, their flat stones sucked naked of its sweet flesh. I will make a purée of them, too, to stir into whipped cream or thick yoghurt as an impromptu dessert, or slice them into matchsticks and toss with crisp carrots and a hot dressing of lime juice, mint leaves and hot, crisp flecks of dried chilli.
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