(Photo: from Wikipedia)
John in Chicago (thanks, John!) has passed along another interesting NY Times article about a fruit that I'd frankly never heard of that has become quite the rage in the food world:
There’s something about the mangosteen, amplified by its longtime unavailability, that has driven its devotees to obsession and hyperbole. Thus Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1902, entranced by the fruit’s mystique, “You’ll know what my riddle means / When you’ve eaten mangosteens.”snip
“I’d love to be able to put them on the menu,” Sébastien Rouxel, the pastry chef at Per Se, said after tasting samples.
From Wikipedia:
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about Queen Victoria offering a cash reward to anyone who could deliver to her the fabled fruit. Although available in cans and frozen, mangosteens are rarely sold fresh in Western countries except rarely in some Asian grocery stores; they are illegal to import without fumigation as whole fruit into the United States due to fears that they harbor the Asian fruit fly which would devastate US crops if it were ever introduced. In the future new irradiation techniques may allow importation of this delicacy. Products derived from the mangosteen are legally imported into the U.S. such as juices and nutritional supplements.
Has anybody ever eaten one?
I had the wonderful priviledge of spending time in Thailand and savoring the different fruits, vegetables and prepared dishes from that country. My absolute favorite fruit was the mangosteen or "mongkut" as it was called by the thai people after their King Mongkut who reigned in the 1800's.
Hard outer skin much like a pomegranite which you peeled back to expose a mandarin-like structure of pure white fruit sections. It is called the Queen of Fruit while the ridiculously pungeant Durian is the King.
Importfood.com has canned mangosteen --- nothing like the fresh but yet if you drain and rinse the fruit from the horrid syrup it's good! If someone knows where to get the fresh fruit in the states, I want to know!!
Good information, Anita, thanks!
Is there a way to describe the flavor with falling into the "tastes like chicken" trap?
Are you near any Chinatowns? I just bought fresh mangosteen from a fruit stand in NYC Chinatown on Canal St. It was $8/lb.