With mangoes in grocery stores, at roadside stands and farmers' markets and even — occasionally! — on backyard trees, a reader who signs herself just "Lani" e-mailed to ask for a recipe for mango bread that ran in the Advertiser food section 10-plus years ago. "It was the best mango bread I've ever tasted," she writes.

Well, we've run a lot of mango bread recipes over the years, most in a standard formula: flour, sugar, leavenings and cinnamon combined with vegetable oil, eggs, diced mango and optional nuts, coconut, raisins, etc. I'm sharing the recipe below because it comes from a 1985 column by the late Maili Yardley, whose judgment I trusted. Maili rarely commented on the recipes she shared, but she annotated this: "This is a special treat!"

Some variations: I have found that using part brown sugar and part white sugar adds an additional layer of flavor and creates a moister crumb in quick breads, and you can even get away with cutting the sugar by a quarter. You could make this recipe with half Splenda, half sugar if you use sugar substitutes. Other recipes shared over the years used mac nuts instead of walnuts and raisins instead of coconut. One variation, from a cookbook called "Cooking With Hawaiian Mangoes" by Lee and Mae Keao, calls for a 6-ounce can of crushed pineapple, drained, and replaces coconut and raisins with pineapple. Although most quick-bread recipes use oil, one that sounds interestingly rich, from a 1990 Maili Yardley column, uses butter, brown and white sugars, vanilla and lemon extracts, evaporated milk and, for added texture, a half-cup of wheat germ along with raisins and nuts.

RAY'S SUPER MANGO BREAD