Momma and me, Christmas 1971. She always wore a long skirt on Christmas day.

At the risk of making my husband sound pathetic, which he is not, I will tell you he cannot peel and cut a mango. He will do it when I'm not around, but he makes a hash of it, and I don't mean that in the English way as in, "Bloody 'ell, you've made a hash of that now, 'aven't you?" I mean it in the Southern way, as in the turkey hash Momma would make about 5 days after Thanksgiving when there was still some meat left on the carcass but the pieces were all too little and dry and laced with the nasty gristly cartilage stuff that none of us would eat. And it was mostly dark meat and Momma was the only one who liked the dark meat. She said, "It's so SWEET," which my sisters and I found absolutely nonsensical and repugnant at once, because how could meat be sweet? She would claw at that carcass, scraping the meat off with her fingernail until she had a collection of enough meat to feed our family of five on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. Then she would get out the black iron skillet and drop a blob of Crisco in it, because everything Momma made started with Crisco, and fry up some onions. Momma didn't saute, she fried. Then she would drop the turkey scrapings in there along with some salt and pepper and thickener. Today, my sisters and I would make a roux by sprinkling the concoction with flour and then add liquid to make a creamy sauce, but that's not how Momma did it. Momma would take an old salad dressing jar and put in a few heaping tablespoons of flour, then add about a cup of milk, put the top on and shake it up good. Then she would pour that over the turkey and onions and stir it quick. Since she never measured it, the amount of thickening would vary with every recipe. We would sometimes have it over rice and sometimes over biscuits, but the point is that it was HASH, in the Southern sense of the word - a chopped up mess of indistinguishable foodstuff. It looked like shit, but it tasted delicious and I actually make it myself on occasion, when I tire of my more cosmopolitan Thanksgiving leftover favorite, turkey tetrazzini.

So when Tony tries to carve up a mango, it looks like something Momma scraped off a turkey carcass with her fingernail. He winds up with a bowl full of thick mango juice and hairy blobs of unappetizing fruitmess. You might not have known this, but mangoes are really high in fiber and I'm pretty sure it's because of all that hairiness. Tony is the kind of person who doesn't care what his fruit looks like because it's just going to get chewed up and digested, but I care, and I care deeply. That is why I am the one to carve up the mango.

How I did it

Carving a mango is very simple once you understand the anatomy. I don't need to go to the trouble to create a tutorial for this because the people at RealSimple have done a great job with this video. I only disagree with one thing in the video. Under the list of tools you need to undertake this task, they have a "Y-shaped peeler." Do not feel that you need to run out to the store right now to buy a Y-shaped peeler because, trust me, you can do it with an ordinary knife. There are plenty of people, like my daughter, who live in tiny apartments in New York City and just do not have the space for all these little specialized gadgets. I personally use a paring knife and, let me tell you, it is sharp because it is still quite new from the knife set Tony gave me for Christmas. We had needed knives so badly that he gave me a set and I gave him a set so, of course, we took back the set that I had bought because his was better because he had researched the knives and bought the most expensive set he could find. I took the set he gave me into the kitchen and used that little paring knife to cut a lemon for my Bloody Mary and wound up with a bloody finger. I have always heard that, when someone gives you knives, you have to pay them something for them - like a penny - because otherwise it is bad luck. I guess I should have done that. So, while I use a paring knife instead of a Y-shaped peeler to peel the mango, I do it very carefully.

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How to cut a mango

How I did it