Froot Three
My friend Jenna who was recently in Thailand wanted to emphasize in an email how lucky she was to be in a tropical, post-tsunami paradise. How did she emphasize this? Well, among other things, she pointed out that although missing everyone back home in NYC, she was enjoying fresh Mangosteen.
This is the fruit that, when good, is maybe enough to forsake the western world, civilization, power, money, and all sorts of things. If you had asked me what I was looking forward to this summer, one of the answers was definitely "eating mangosteen again."
Here’s the whole fruit intact. This is what the "queen of fruit" looks like when you bust it open.
Perhaps it is strange to call something the "queen of fruit." This doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best fruit in the world, but perhaps does mean that like the queen this fruit is a bit sensitive and has to be handled with care, and you shouldn’t leave it out too long because it might expire and declare "orf with his head!"
Which is to say manggis, as the Indonesians call it, is a bit precious and therefore touchy. We don’t get these in the western world because once you pick these things from the trees where they grow, they just begin to decompose and fall to pieces. And this isn’t like bananas where there’s that great period where it just starts to rot a little bit and therefore gets all tasty.
No, there’s some intelligent design going on with this fruit. You see from the outside that it has a rough, purplish exterior. Sometimes, that shell is hard as a rock - you have to find the vein where you can carefully break it open to reveal that wonderful white fruit inside. But be careful - the fruit is sweeter than you can imagine when good, but if you bust into the purplish shell the wrong way, it gets all mashed up with the fruit, and what was once the juicy sweet flavor turns bitter and puckers you up harder than the sourest of lemons.
And this is the other thing - from the outside, they look perfectly reasonable, almost always. But you never know when you open it up if it is going to be big chunks of liquidy tasty fruit on the inside, or if there will be shriveled little husks, if it’s going to be the illusion of big fruit but really just big, mostly inedible seeds, or if there will be fruit that looks reasonable until you realize that some sort of yellow fungus has started growing on the inside of the shell. It’s totally unpredictable, and frequently all of these conditions can exist within one fruit. And there are no rules - hard or soft, small or big, any of these descriptives may apply.
The flavor of mangosteen here are about the same as what I used to get in Singapore, but the barkish husks around the fruit are a bit less intense. In Singapore (and these were most certainly not *from* Singapore), the husks had a certain amount of moisture absorbed in them to the extent that if you weren’t careful, it was very easy to stain your clothing with purple drippings when you squeezed them open. The insides of the shells here are a bit more on the pink side, and much more dry.
When you go away to this part of the world, you be a lot of missing people; but until you come back, you be missing mangosteen. Sometimes, we have to leave the sweetest things behind.
