Fruits have been the basic food of both herbivorous man and animal but not of carnivorous animals distinguished by their canine teeth.
Of course, both herbivorous man and carnivorous animals like domesticated dogs and cats have become omnivorous owing to necessity. Even the carrion eater of the jungles the fox is fabled to have tried to eat sour grapes.
The importance of fruits as the food of early man is symbolised in story of Adam the first man in the biblical and Kuranic traditions and Eve the Old Testament first woman, the mother of the human race fashioned by God from the rib of Adam.
The Buddha accepting a gift of a mango grove from Ambapali the courtesan is one of the earliest references to the mango fruit. Arhant Maha Mahinda, son of Emperor Dharmasoka who introduced Buddhism to Lanka asking questions about a mango tree from King Devanampiya Tissa to test the king's intelligence to see whether the king could understand the Buddha's doctrine is the second instance in Buddhist history where the mango tree is mentioned.
My first recollection of fruits was when I was a toddler. There was a mee amba (honey mango) tree in the compound of the Katupitiya Government Mixed School in the bungalow of which we lived, in addition to the cashew trees, the sour sop or anona (Katu anoda) trees and an orange tree bearing a large number of sweet fruits. In about the year 1945 when the Second World War was still being fought some foreign soldiers on horse back came to the school compound and asked for oranges.
When my father in his abundant generosity told them to pluck any number of fruits one soldier while sitting on his horse plucked oranges for all of them by bending the branches with his rifle. The surplus oranges from this tree numbering hundreds were sold by my father as he had leased out the land from the Government.
Thereafter when my father and my mother came on transfer to Kottawa we stayed the brief period of six months at a large old house with a portico, in a coconut, rubber and cinnamon land. There were white Columbian mango (rata amba) trees in the land owned by the land lady who was the sole occupant of the house because her son who was the Public Trustee at the time lived in his official residence in Colombo. Our family consisting of my father, mother, younger sister and younger brother looked after the old lady and when she got her labourers to pluck mangoes she gave us liberal quantities of the fruit.
For the six months we were there I attended Dharmapala Vidyalaya, Pannipitiya and part of the school compound was full of dan bushes. During the interval we of the 3rd standard plucked the ripe purple coloured berries. I first saw a damson tree full of the red and purple coloured plum-like fruits in the compound of the lady teacher to whose house I went in the evening for tuition.
Mangoes
Then in our own land at Gampaha where we lived for the next 46 years there were a large number of fruit trees there were about eight kinds of mangoes namely rata amba, betti amba, pol amba, dampara, villard, peter peasant, ambul amba (sour mangoes) and pilikuttu amba, a species confined to the area around Pilikuttuwa Raja Maha Viharaya which has now been declared a sacred area owing to the valuable ancient cave paintings there.
The Pol Amba tree in front of our house was about the height of a very tall coconut tree and the fruits in bunches were as large as medium-sized papaws. The fruit was bright yellow when ripe and contained a large quantity of delicious flesh as the seed was flat. My father used the 12 bore single barrelled shot gun he had for 35 years only once a year and that was to bring down a bunch of mangoes by shooting at its stem at the auspicious time to light the kitchen hearth on the New Year day, to signal my mother who was waiting to perform the rite. Unfortunately after the pol amba tree died I have not seen the like of this variety of mangoes anywhere else in the country.
In addition to mango there were orange, narang (tangerine), guava, avocado, lime, lemolime, pomegranate, uguressa, gooseberry, heart-shaped red custard apple, naminan, lavulu, beli, divul, ilama, papaw, banana and plantain, breadfruit, jak (both wela and waraka) trees, half an acre of kew pineapples and passion fruit creepers bearing red and yellow fruits in our garden. Later I planted one acre of Mauritius pineapples. Ilama is a big green custard apple with spiking buttons on the skin. This variety of anona along with the red passion fruit was brought by me from Nuwara Eliya but grew well in the warm climate at Gampaha. Our one hectare land was a virtual orchard with fruit trees that grew with little effort on our part.
In the late 1940s and into the 1950s most local fruits were hardly sold in the market and were not grown in plantation. Fruits were a home garden product. Only imported fruits like fresh grapes, apples and later Haifa oranges and dried fruits like raisins, dates etc were sold in the market. Nuwara Eliya pears came later. Now even Australian Kiwi fruit, plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines and imported grape fruits are available in super markets.
Jams
Marmalade orange, locquats, peaches, mulberry, strawberry are also found in our country as nature's bounty. Marmalade made of marmalade oranges and sweet oranges is a delicacy that is eaten with bread and butter. Mulberry that could be grown in any compound makes an excellent jam.
I can recall the day I first ate an apple. I used to accompany my father to the Katupitiya cooperative store when he went there to supervise its operations as the President of the Cooperative Society. There were sweet smelling green apples wrapped in tissue paper and green grapes in pinewood boxes with cork dust put in to prevent crushing, for sale there in addition to Australian IXL jams in tins. I ate the green apple which my father gave me but vomited later because as I learnt later raw apples with rind are too acidic and for that reason apples are given to young children peeled and cooked in sugar syrup.
Banana is the fruit that is most widely consumed. The more popular banana in the world is Peesang Ambon (ambun) that was marketed with the chiquita label, grown in the banana republics of Central America. Its origin is traced to Amboina or Ambon an island in Indonesia in the Moluccas. The raw banana is sliced and dried to make flour. A porridge made of it fed even to infants. The other species of banana are the sour plantains, ash plantains, kolikuttu, suwandel, puvalu, anamalu, rata hondravalu, nethra palam, etambura, mondan, alu mondan, morathavalu, kithala or seeni kehel, sudu kochchi, rath kehel etc. which are eaten ripe made into curries, fried as chips or eaten boiled with scraped coconut. It is sour plantation (ambul) that is eaten boiled with the peel intact, after cutting the two ends of the fruits, adding a little salt, with scraped coconut as the main meal. Ash plantains (alu kehel) contain the most proteins out of all bananas.
Once when I visited my mother hospitalised at the Wathupitiwala Base Hospital, Attanagalle, she had been served rice with ash plantain cooked whole, in coconut milk, with the peel.
Ash plantains are most nutritious when ripe. An Ayurvedic rejuvenative medicine (Rasayanaya) is made by mixing ripe ash plantain with kithul jaggery and after putting the mixture into a clay pot, covering its mouth with a cloth tied round its neck, topping it with a clay lid (moodiya) and keeping the pot buried under the fire place in the kitchen or buried in paddy inside a silo (wee bissa or pettiya) for three months. Rath kehel (red bananas) called merenda valu in Tamil because of its medicinal properties can be grown in the home garden close to the pit to which kitchen refuse is put. Once I planted a rath kehel sucker near the cow dung pit at our cattle shed and it bore a very large bunch of the prized fruit each about eight inches long.
I tried to grow a durian tree the king of all fruits. But it died due to prolonged drought. Durian is a large tree Durio zebethinus native to South East Asia bearing oval spiny fruits containing creamy pulp with a fetid smell and agreeable taste. Duri in Malay means thorn. It is grown as a plantation crop in this region. In our country durian grows roughly in Gampaha district in the low country wet zone and beyond Kadugannawa up to Kotmale in the inter-montane zone. However 90 per cent of the durian crop in this country is wasted owing to plucking when the fruit is not mature enough for quick ripening. Such fruits vendors try to sell in vain give out no smell and pallid in colour.
Only the uninitiated eat such fruits sold on the wayside.
Those selling it don't lose because it is purchased dirt cheap from the villagers. Traders at the stalls next to Manning market don't sell durian now because I enlightened them about it. Durian cream canned by a reputed cannery used to sold at grocers and super markets but not now.
So the connoisseur is denied the opportunity of tasting this ambrosial fruit which is classed as the best fruit in the world taste wise and nutrition wise. The last time I ate durian was five years ago when I stayed in a house in the heart of Kandy town in the compound of which there were three very large durian trees. Early morning I used to pick the fruits, fallen during the night. The taste of these tree ripened fruits was exquisite.
Best use must be made of the fruits produced in the country by seeing that only the mature fruits are plucked and as far as possible naturally ripened. Smoke ripening and ripening by applying chemical substances as ripening agents in quantities and in the manner prescribed by the Department of Agriculture, only, should be permitted. The agricultural extension officers should be made to see that immature fruits are not harvested. What happens today is that dealers go to the villages and buy the crop of the whole tree dirt cheap from the farmers and sell it to traders in the cities. More often than not excessive chemical treatment of the fruits to force the unmatured fruits to ripen quickly, all at the same, makes them tasteless, watery and of less nutritive value. These fruits also go bad in no time and a large proportion is thrown away. But the intermediaries between the producer and the consumer get a good profit because it is purchased from the producers at a very low price.
Mahaweli zones
It is because there is quality control in countries like the USA, Australia, India, Pakistan, South Africa that the fruits that we import from these countries are beyond complaint. The other consolation is that a quota of the fruits like cantaloupe and other kinds of melons grown in the Mahaweli zones, for export, are released to the local market. One cannot say this of the mango, papaw, avocado, bananas etc available in the local market except in the village fairs to which producers bring their produce directly.
For instance one seller at Kadugannawa where there is a Sunday fair sells good quality durian fruit. Good quality mangoes, avocados, bananas etc also could be had at this fair. This is true of other fairs held in towns.
Apart from the fruits eaten ripe, jak and breadfruit can be used as a substitute for rice and bread etc. made of wheat flour. Boiled jak and breadfruit is best eaten with scraped coconut, lunu miris with maldive fish and other curries.
Tender jak is made into a curry. Our family caretaker Peter Appuhamy who devoted all his life looking after us was also an excellent cook and the polos curry he cooked is unsurpassable. He used two coconuts to cook one tender jak fruit. He added the milk of one to the polos along with the paste of chillie, condiments, garlic, curry leaves, maldive fish etc. and the kernel of the other coconut cut into thin slices. The clay pot containing the mixture was put on the hearth to cook overnight to be eaten at all three meals the following day.
Breadfruit, a tree of the Pacific Islands was brought to this country by the Dutch who ruled us from 1656 to 1796 to make the villagers eat it and for them (the Dutch) to export the rice thus saved. Boiled breadfruit should always be eaten with a liberal quantity of scraped coconut to neutralise the acids in it. It is said that even elephants do not eat the ripe fruit fallen under the trees in the jungle. Breadfruit can also be eaten thinly sliced, dried and fried in oil coated with either chillie powder and salt or put in sugar syrup.
Mature jak pods cut into strips can be prepared in the same manner. Fruits are so prized in countries like America that selected fruits packed in cartons by the dozen can be ordered through the mail and sent as gifts. In India the mango is regarded as the king of fruits and mangoes of good quality are sold by the basket.
We export fruits of good quality including pineapples, confined earlier to the area covered by Gampaha district but now grown in other areas of the country too.
Papaws are also grown on a commercial scale and the most favourite variety is the red lady with the sweet deep pink flesh. As it earlier got spoiled in transporting owing to the thin skin. Improved varieties with a skin thick enough to withstand the rigours of transportation have been now developed. A kind of yellow fruit called lansi gaslabu in the olden days is cultivated now using only organic manure is available in super markets.
Kinds of anona like cherimoya and sour sop make the best sherberts in the world served in star class hotels. Most of the acidic fruits can be mixed with milk to make excellent drinks. Fruits are also used to make sundaes, ice creams and cocktails. Wines are distilled from fruits even other than grapes. Cider is made from apple juice. Jams of the IXL brand are made even from forest fruits.
Even in our country there are fruits that grow wild in the forest like palu, weera, mora, himbutu, ambul pera (sour guava) etc. Nature has been very generous to our country in giving us many more fruits like Kamaranka (star fruit or star apple) koholle lavulu, rambuttan, gadu guda, donga, ambarella, mangosteen, tamarind, gal siyambala, palmyra fruit etc some of which have spread from other countries. It is a pity that there is a scant respect for fruits as a commodity consumed by the common man. The ordinary man does not get his money's worth when he buys fruits of low quality and sometimes injurious to health.
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