Mangosteens, then and now

Eleven years ago I had my first mangosteen, and then many more over the course of the few months I spent in Malaysia. Despite some misgivings about the texture, I thought that it might be my perfect fruit – sweet, almost rich but with a great juicy, tangy, refreshing quality. I do realize that this is a ridiculous description of a fruit’s taste – sweet, tangy, rich, juicy, refreshing – all words that can be used to describe so many kinds of fruit. I think maybe I mean that it was all these things, but so much more intensely than any other fruit I’d had. Then I left Malaysia and there were no more mangosteens, and as far as I could tell, there wouldn’t be for a very long time, if ever.

When I tried to explain them to people who had never seen or tasted a mangosteen, I was a little bit at a loss. The outside was easy enough – very dark purple, the colour and also roughly the size of a ripe granadilla, but perfectly round and smooth with a stalk. When it came to describing the inside, though, I couldn’t think how. My best shot was to say that the fruit is segmented, like a citrus fruit, but with only one big seed in the biggest segment; and the segments are white. I suppose that does describe what they look like, but somehow not clearly enough.

Now, eleven years later, we are in Singapore and I have been reunited with mangosteens. We bought a net bag full last week and as soon as we were back in our hotel room, I peeled one and gave Andrew one of the segments before eating one myself; I was so excited for him to try this near-perfect fruit. Delicious, was his verdict, and “when it’s peeled it looks like a head of garlic”, he said.

Yes. Yes, it does, a much more concise description.

They are still very good, but the fruit inside the thick peel is so small, the texture still strange, and I’ve decided I don’t like the segment with the one big seed at all. I feel a little disappointed in myself that I am no longer so easily moved to rapturous declarations about fruit, but I suppose it’s natural to be more given to extremes at seventeen than at twenty-eight.

So in the end, having upheld them as my perfect fruit for eleven years, mangosteens are making me feel old and a little alienated from my former self. I must remember in the future not to have quite such high expectations for fruit.