“September 24th
Forbidden Fruit: Something About a Mangosteen
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
BANGKOK
I’m a big-time mangosteen addict, which presents problems.
The mangosteen — a tropical fruit about the size of a tangerine,
whose leathery maroon shell surrounds moist, fragrant, snowwhite
segments of ambrosial flesh — can’t get a visa.
Mangosteens may not legally be imported into the United States.
They may not legally be shipped to the mainland from Hawaii,
where a few sturdy souls have lately begun to grow them anyway.
Brian Palmer for The New York Times
BRING ON THE RAIN Mangosteens flourish
in areas of very high humidity, like Southeast Asia.
Here in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam
and Singapore, people buy them by the bagful for small change.
In Vancouver and other Canadian cities with big Asian populations,
you can find them at street markets and greengrocers. In
Paris, Fauchon will sell you one for a prince’s if not quite a king’s ransom.
But back home in Washington, the best I can do without jumping on
a plane is the wooden mangosteen, handsomely carved and oiled,
that sits on my desk there.
So what, you may say. What’s he getting worked up about?
He can gobble up papayas, mangoes and even rambutans
when he gets a tropical itch. In the summer, he can eat
perfectly ripe peaches, still warm from the tree, and dark,
sweet plums whose juices squirt out when a tooth breaks
through their taut skins.
Friends have accused me of craving mangosteens because
they are beyond my reach, the way children in the old Soviet
Union craved oranges. Not guilty, say I.
No other fruit, for me, is so thrillingly, intoxicatingly luscious,
so evocative of the exotic East, with so precise a balance of
acid and sugar, as a ripe mangosteen. I thought so when
I first tasted one half a lifetime ago, in Singapore, and I’ve
thought so ever since. I’d rather eat one than a hot fudge
sundae, which for a big Ohio boy is saying a lot.
“By popular acclaim,” writes the British-born Malaysian author
Desmond Tate in “Tropical Fruit” (Tuttle Publishing, 2001),
“the mangosteen is held to be the most delectable of all the
tropical fruits, and it has been proclaimed their queen. There is no
doubt about the luxury of its taste. It has won unstinted praise
down the ages from all who have encountered it.”[...]
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company”
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Nice Site layout for your blog. I am looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Humes
Thank you Tom
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