- The Plate
Meet the Mangosteen
The "Queen of Fruits" is hard to find in the U.S. To understand why, you need to understand how fruit makes the cut for the grocery store.
If you’ve never tasted a mangosteen, then you’ve never tasted the most exquisite fruit of the tropics. And that's not just one opinion, it's the consensus of farmers, explorers, and royalty going back centuries.
European colonists stumbled upon the small purple tree fruit in Southeast Asia, where they found it to be a delicious mix of lychee, peach, strawberry, and pineapple flavors. The fruit spoiled so fast that someone started the rumor around 1890 that Queen Victoria would grant knighthood to anyone who brought her one. It was, whether true or not, enough to earn the mangosteen the widely-accepted title as "the queen of fruits."
The mangosteen has a rather illustrious history for a fruit that most Americans have
