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Mangosteen

The queen of tropical fruits,mangosteen,is cute and round, and is about the size of a lawn tennis ball.Its Malay name is manggis,and how did it get its English name "mango's teen" is a real puzzle for it is not related to mango in any way.
Its black or dark brownish skin is smooth and thick providing protection to the delicate flesh insdie.
It is easy to open a mangosteen,just remove the short stubby stalk on top,then place the fruit between your palms and press gently,then use your fingers to press until the cracked thick skin break into two.
The fleshy seeds will be exposed,use a spoon or toth pick to remove the mangosteen flesh from the skin and eat it.But we usually use our index fingers,hmm.."fingers licking good" again!
You may wonder why should we dig the flesh out and not bite it off the skin directly? The answer is simple,the skin may make your lips and nose tip a meshy purple colour if you are not careful.More over,the skin is bitter,if you accidently bite a bit off it,the taste of the mangosteen will be spoilt.
The mangosteen flesh is also pearly white in colour and is very sweet.Camparing to the rambutan's simple oval shaped seed,the mangosteen seed is more sophiscated in appearance.While the seed is also round in shape as a whole,but it is further divided into many slices neatly tugged within the skin compartment.The slices are also of various size, from as big as the thumb to as small as the little finger.Looking from the top,it resembles the crown,no wonder it will earn the name of The Queen!

The mangosteen tree are tall with densely clustered leaves,some older ones may grow into 2-storey tall.But with the advance of agricultural technology,the mangosteen trees are much shorter now.The leaves are round and thick and relatively stiff as compared to other fruit trees' leaves.They are not grown on a commercial scale,if they do the plantations are usally quite small. Usually they are grown as secondary crops scattered about in between durian trees and rambutan trees.People believe that the mangosteen is "cold" in nature and will help to cool down our bodies after eatting too much of durians,which is beleived to be "heaty" in nature.In simple words,if we eat too much durians will give us flu and high fever,but eatting mangosteen will help to prevent this from happening. This is old traditional wisdom,believe it or not is up to you.My advice is believe it,and don't forget to also take home a few bundles of mangosteen while you are loading up your car with durians.

The mangosteen fruits will also fall by themselves when ripen.When we visited the durian plantations as children,if we didn't find any mangosteen on the floor, we would climb up the tree,then shook the branches vigorously.The ripen ones would then fall to the ground. Unripen mangosteens are greenish white in colour,and turn brown or purple or black when they begin to ripe.Do you know that green mangosteens are tasty too? When we were children in the villages, we would pluck some unripen ones if we could not shake any ripen ones off the branches.We would go to the river and peel the raw skin with a knife under running stream water because raw mangosteens have very sticky juice and make your fingers brownish or purple.The stains will only fade away fater several days and made your fingers look very ugly.We would then bury the peeled mangosteens in the cold sand of the river bed and left them there for hours while we played and swam in the river.We loved the chilled raw mangosteens,cool, crispy and very sweet.Remeber,not many kampung folks can afford a fridge during those days. Unfortunately,mangosteen can not be dried,preserved or prickled.You can only consume it fresh,a queen is a queen!

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