Forbidden
Fruit: Something About a Mangosteen
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
As
featured in The New York Times and Gourmet Magazine
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, snow-white 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.
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."
I could tell you that the flavor reminds me of
litchis, peaches and clementines, mingled in a
single succulent mouthful, but words can no more
describe how mangosteens taste than explain why
I love my wife and children. Merely typing the
name makes my mouth water. Whenever in my travels
I spot a mound of those precious orbs in a marketplace,
my heart pounds.
For years, before she finally tasted one, I drove
my wife, Betsey, almost around the bend talking
about mangosteens, telling her that whatever luxurious
item we were consuming at a given moment was no
match for my forbidden fruit.
I'm not alone in my mania. My friend Gay Bilson,
one of Australia's greatest cooks, says that the
first time she cut open a mangosteen and tasted
a segment, she "burst into tears at the sheer
perfection of it, almost pushed to mawkish poetry."
Karen
Caplan, president of Frieda's, a wholesaler of
specialty produce in Los Alamitos, Calif., said
she could not believe her senses at age 16 when
her mother gave her a bite of a ripe mangosteen
from Belize."
Queen Victoria reportedly offered
a knighthood to anyone who could bring her a specimen
in edible condition. Nobody ever managed to snatch
the prize.
In her time, the problem was spoilage.
In our day and our country, it is the Mediterranean
fruit fly, which the Department of Agriculture,
ever vigilant in its protection of domestic crops,
does its best to stop at the borders of the continental
United States. Mangosteens can be infested with
the dread insect, and until recently, no safe
way to assure "disinfestation," as the
bureaucrats call it, had been found.
Yet there are tantalizing prospects
that the gates may open, if not this year, then
next year, or someday soon.
THE breakthrough, or rather the
potential for one, came last October, when the
government issued a ruling that all fruits and
vegetables that might carry fruit flies could
now be irradiated for sale in the United States.
Irradiated papayas and other fruits
from Hawaii have been sold in California for several
years. But the new ruling could open the huge
American market to growers all over the world,
and could bring mangosteens to American dinner
tables at last.
Before that can happen, however,
a risk assessment must be carried out for each
type of fruit and each producing entity, according
to Dr. I. Paul Gadh, an import specialist at the
Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Services in Riverdale, Md., near Washington.
He said he could offer no prediction on when the
work on mangosteens might be completed.
Equipment to carry out irradiation,
manufactured by the SureBeam Corporation of San
Diego, is already in operation in Hawaii and Brazil,
and a system has recently been sold to Vietnam.
Mark Stephenson, a SureBeam vice
president, said that fruits (or meats, on which
it is already widely used) are briefly bombarded
with a stream of electrons similar to X-rays.
The electron beams are generated by electrical
power, he said, and no nuclear materials are used.
The process raises the temperature
of the material being irradiated by only one degree,
causing no change in the taste or the texture.
It eliminates pests and retards spoilage by destroying
harmful food-borne bacteria. But it has generated
controversy.
Although approved by the American
Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association,
the World Health Organization and other bodies,
irradiation has long been opposed by a few activist
groups. The most prominent of these is Public
Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader, which has contended
that more detailed research is needed on the long-term
results of irradiation before it can be considered
safe.
"Exposing food to ionizing
radiation results in the formation of potentially
carcinogenic compounds," Wenonah Hauter,
a Public Citizen official, told a Congressional
committee in 2001. She also asserted that the
process destroys crucial vitamins.
Christine M. Bruhn, director of
the Center for Consumer Research at the University
of California at Davis, dismissed such criticisms
out of hand. "There is no indication whatsoever
of any ill effects," she said, arguing that
Public Citizen's views were based on outdated
and irrelevant data.
"Any worries about irradiation
are very small," said Michael F. Jacobson,
executive director of the Center for Science in
the Public Interest, based in Washington. "I
would welcome more research, but I haven't been
exercised about this, and I'm still not."
Still, consumer resistance to
irradiated foods has been high, and some supermarkets
do not stock them. James Parker, director of the
northern Pacific region for Whole Foods, a Texas-based
chain, told The San Francisco Chronicle that he
welcomed the phase-out of methyl bromide disinfestation
that irradiation might help make possible, but
would not carry irradiated produce.
"We don't want the cure to
be worse than the disease," Mr. Parker said.
"We still don't know the long-term effects."
THE mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana)
originated, most botanists believe, in Malaysia
or the Sunda Islands of Indonesia. Fruits are
borne on very slow-growing evergreen trees with
glossy, dark green leaves and pyramid-shaped crowns.
At maturity the trees, which require high humidity
and heavy rainfall, can reach 40 feet in height
and yield up to 1,000 fruits a year.
Mangosteen trees can tolerate
no temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which
restricts their range. Outside of Southeast Asia,
they have flourished in just a few places —
southern India, some islands in the Caribbean
(where they produce inferior fruit) and Queensland,
in northeastern Australia.
They have done badly in California,
worse in Florida. Commercial cultivation is in
its early stages in Hawaii, on the rainy east
coast of the Big Island, around the city of Hilo,
where mangosteens are sold in the farmers' market.
But mangosteens have been known
to American botanists for a century. In 1930,
the great plant explorer David Fairchild, who
lived near Miami, wrote as follows about the fruit:
"It is so delicate that it
melts in the mouth like ice cream. The flavor
is quite indescribably delicious. There is nothing
to mar the perfection of this fruit, unless it
be that the juice from the rind forms an indelible
stain on a white napkin. Even the seeds are partly
or wholly lacking and when present are very thin
and small."
Ms. Caplan, the produce wholesaler,
said she doubted that the mangosteen would match
the kiwi fruit in rapid acceptance in the United
States. But once available, she predicted, it
would gain immediate popularity among Asian-Americans,
with the remainder of the population following
along
later, perhaps in seven or eight years.
For the most part, mangosteens
are eaten out of hand. (A real fan has trouble
getting them home; they tend to disappear in the
car on the way from the market.)
In southern Thailand, around Phuket,
Thais use green mangosteens in a vegetarian curry.
In Goa, they are used in a fish curry. Like soursops,
a more fibrous fruit with a similar taste, they
make a rich, heady sorbet.
In his encyclopedic "Thai
Food" (Ten Speed Press, 2002), David Thompson
includes an enticing recipe for beef and mangosteen
soup. Anyone for mangosteen margaritas?
Lore and legend seem to follow
this fabulous fruit wherever it goes.
One Sunday morning at Bangkok's rich Aw Taw Kaw
open-air market, Bob Halliday, an American writer
and translator who has lived in Thailand for 35
years, showed me how to pick the best ones.
"Squeeze them," he advised,
as he did just that. "They should yield to
pressure, and should have no hard spots. The darker
the color the better the taste."
At the stem end, mangosteens have
four waxy sepals. At the other, they have four
to eight flat, woody lobes, arranged in a pretty
rosette. That much I had known. What I had not
known, and what Mr. Halliday told me, is that
the number of those lobes corresponds exactly
to the number of fruit segments arranged inside
as exquisitely as the jewels inside a Fabergé
egg.
Dubious, I bought and then cut
open five or six mangosteens right then and there,
strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry,
of course. He was right.
On another day, in another market,
Aun Koh, a young Singaporean photographer, explained
to me the Chinese belief that the primary forces
influencing bodily health are heat and coolness.
In this balance between yin and
yang, mangosteens supply the cool element to offset
the heat of the other most-loved Southeast Asian
fruit, the huge, spiky durian, whose foul aroma
would stun a goat. Many Asians therefore like
to consume the two fruits at the same time.
"We describe the mangosteen
as the queen of fruits," he reminded me.
"We call the durian the
king."
Well, I for one have always preferred
the company of ladies.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
