A STRANGE FRUIT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1070, 6 September 1930, Page 27

A STRANGE FRUIT

THE MANGOSTEEN GETS TO LONDON NOVELTIES WITH HISTORY The mangosteen, we are told, has made its appearance in London (says a writer in “The Observer”). Covent Garden is not impressed, but there is romance, nevertheless, behind this experimental consignment. At the Umpire Marketing Board they put it to me thus: “Some time in the last century a Swedish novelist, Frederika Bremer, went to South Carolina and there beheld a strange fruit called the banana, of which she wrote, ‘ln form it resembles r large seed cucumber, i could have fancied I was eating soap. The banana and i, I fancy, will not become good friends.’” And the first coi ercial consignment of bananas to London, not much more than thirty years ago, had to be given away. So the novel fruit of today may be the popular fruit of tomorrow, and the Empire Marketing Board takes in hand the "dooryard” fruits of the tropics and sees whether it is possible to give them a chance here. It keeps a little laboratory near Covent Garden where the storage and transport

THE MANGOSTEEN As for the mangosteen, which an E.M.B. official produced for me from t ! depths of his desk, 1 am afraid its hard, faded purple shell, about the size of an orange, did not make my mouth water a bit. At first they tried to bring the stranger over wrapped in rubber latex, but it was ordinary cold storage that did the trick. It is the inside of a mangosteen that has given the fruit its aristocratic reputation in Burmah and the few other places where it is grown. Opened with a knife the shell discloses in a cup of royal purple snowy segments the texture of a plum and yet so delicate that they melt in the mouth like ice cream. What historic prestige there is behind some of these strange fruits! The mangosteen was described centuries ago by a botanist named Jacobus Bontius, who compared it with nectar and ambrosia and the golden apples of Hesperides. “Of all the fruits of the eartn,” he reported, “It is by far the most delicious.” Yet the largest mangosteen orchard in the world at present, the one at Saigon, Cochin China, contains only 400 trees, and five years ago the Hawaiian Islands —those isles of fruit—boasted hut a single root. Two or three more successful experimental consignments by the E.M.8., and perhaps somebody will make a move to market mangosteens here, in which case anything might happen. After all, nobody thought in 1921 that the grape fruit, then a novelty in England, would be in such demand as it is now. THE PAPAW AND THE AVOCADO About two years ago it was reported that a number of papaws from India had reached London Docks in safety, and, being but a curiosity, had been sent to a hospital. Now there is a trade in papaws—though a slender one, of course. It is a queer thing that Waller, the poet, had heard of the papaws of Hawaii, and described the magical growth of the tree to 25ft in “Half the circle of the hasty year.” The papaw’s first excursion outside the tropics was to San Francisco, and now, by picking the fruit as poon as it turns yellow, it is being got to the fruit-stands of all the big North American cities and, at this time of the year, to the hotels .of London, where Americans who are no longer loyal to the grape fruit have' it as a breakfast dish.

The avocado may be bought at a few shops. Sir Hans Sloane christened it in 1696 in a catalogue of Jamaica plants, but 20 years ago.it was still a “dooryard” fruit, and even in 1925 avocado orchards in California, Florida, Cuba and Porto Rica did'not exceed 1,000 acres in extent. But since it has been possible to get it to the big cities in good condition, the cultivation of it has extended to many places in the tropics, and a U.S.A. report says of it: “it is on the verge of taking high place among the

food crops contributed by the tropics to the temperate zone.” FRUITS OF B.C. But there are other fancy fruits coming to England at this time of the year which were studied and cultivated long before the avocado was heard of by Europeans. There is the illustrious mango. it was in a grove of mangoes that Buddha himself sought shade. Akbar planted an orchard of 100,000 trees at Darbhanga over three centuries ago, and in 1900 some of these were still yielding. - But it is only in the last twenty years that cultivation has spread to Florida and the West Indies, and the mango, having first been “tried out” in the U.S.A., has settled down to a steadily expanding business in England also. The litchi has done the same. In 200 B.C. the Chinese Emperor Kao Tsu, pining for fresh litchies, ordered the fruit to be brought to him by relays of runners. Some of the runners died, but Kao Tsu got the fresh litchies. In 1914 the first litchi tree was planted in tiie United States, at Santa Barbara, California, and since then its claim to he superior to the. orange (and to taste like a strawberry) lias- commended it to a select circle on both sides of the Atlantic. Tiie tropics are a veritable Amalthea’s horn of fruits, which, one by one, thanks to the art of cold storage, may be brought to our tables. Besides the granadilla; shaddock, guava, cantaloupe. pomelo, and other fancy fruits (hat already come here, there are the longan, the rambutan, the pulascan, akee, mamoncillo, the cherimoya (“Deliciousness itself,” said Mark Twain; "the masterpiece of Nature,”' said Sir Clements Markham), and about fifty other annonas, as this genus is called; not to speak of the numerous and distinguished branches of the myrtle family.

There is, of course, no likelihood of these fruits coming to us at once, and some, being merely calculated to rasp the tongue, will never come at all. Most of them are at present only native crops, whose cultural requirements have yet to be studied and understood ; and every one presents a separate scientific: problem in transport. Still, gradually, we are entering into the tropics inheritance. That is the romance behind these experimental consignments by the Empire Marketing Board,