“Wood apple! Where do you get them?” asked a friend on Instagram, high on memories of her childhood.
My own search for wood apples, or bael, this summer, was driven by nostalgia; I am not a fan of the fruit. There used to be a tree on a road, visible from our home in Guwahati. Everyone passing that tree would either open an umbrella or run past, to avoid being hit by a falling fruit. During summer holidays, we enjoyed watching people run by when they passed that tree.
Nostalgia is a strong force: I found myself wanting to crack a fruit open, just to remind myself of what it looked like inside. I also wanted to smell the strong, sugary yet musky aroma of the fruit, because it seemed to be fading from memory.
A whack with a hand grinding stone cracked the shell. Having opened it, I took a photo of what was inside and posted it on my Instagram. And just like that, my inbox was flooded with notes and memories of childhood from various friends.
FOR DAILY,MADURAI,SEPTEMBER,14,2007. : Woodapple (Vilam Pazham) a fruit sold for Vinayaka Chathurthi festival, kept on display at Simakkal in Madurai on Friday.-PHOTO:S_JAMES.
Most of them remembered its sweetness, and the strong funky smell which made it an amazing ingredient for a summer sherbet. It is a heavy sherbet, I agree. Almost like a smoothie. Another friend remembered how, most of the time, sherbet made with bael was sweetened with sugar or pounded jaggery.
The memories weren’t restricted to sherbet alone. A few echoed my sentiments, “Didn’t like the bael at all as a child. But as an adult, I seem to be craving for it.”
The season and the fruit made a few others recollect their summer holidays. A food writer recollected his ritual with his grandfather, “I used to hate it as a kid, but miss it now. My grandfather used to make sit and take out the pulp and separate the fibre. It was a tedious ritual.”
In his book Xahajlabhya Bon Dorobor Gun, Assamese herbal medicine expert Gunaram Khanikar mentions the benefits of bael . The book, a go-to health journal in all Assamese homes, mentions a brew made of dried slivers of the tender bael to treat stomach ailments.
Bael is also known by different names: monkey fruit, golden apple, and Japanese bitter orange. A bounce test helps determine a ripe fruit. Drop it on a hard surface — if it bounces, the fruit is unripe. A ripe fruit will fall with a thud to the ground. Fully ripe wood apples have a light brown to a toffee brown tone flesh.
