I love most fruits. I like eating them. I like discovering them. Since I grew up in a relatively urban setting, I get excited over food I can forage in the wild. It’s always a thrill to come across fruit-bearing trees and bushes because I was used to encountering their fruits in the supermarket and not in nature.
In my youth, I read about far off places and found out about such things as mossberry in Alaska. I learned about it in a Mills & Boon romance before the age of the Internet and I had no choice but to rely on my imagination (or look it up in the encyclopedia, which was too much of a hassle). So, when I was finally able to google it, I was disappointed to note that the berry didn’t really grow on moss.
Another fruit I read about is bread fruit. It was also in a romance novella, and it was set in Jamaica. Again, it was before the Internet, so I had to rely on my imagination to make out what it would be like. It turns out that it wasn’t the loaf-shaped fruit I was seeing in my mind. It also turns out that we actually have said fruit locally, and I’ve had it before. There was nothing remotely bread-like about it though.
Growing up, I was really curious about berries. There were so many different kinds, and the collector in me just wants to experience them all (okay, I’ll admit it – I want to have them in my garden, not just taste them). Berries aren’t really common here, and those that we have available prefer to grow in cooler climates. I’ve purchased several of them to try growing them, but I’ve only ever had success with mulberry, which is endemic anyway, so it wasn’t really a great triumph.
I’ve tried my hand at heat-tolerant strawberries, thornless blackberries, and sapinit (the local raspberry), but I didn’t really have the right space at that time for them. I plan to give it another whirl though. I’m looking at heat-tolerant blueberries too, but the sponsored ad going around Facebook is apparently a scam. Those who ordered ended up with chico sapote seedlings.
I made it sound like I grew up in an apartment building in the city, but that wasn’t the case. I had a front yard and a backyard. The back had a coco palm tree, which bore coconuts, but was really there mostly for aesthetic purposes. There was also an aratiles (muntingia – it has a lot of other fun common names like cotton candy berry and festival berry) tree, a guyabano (sour sop) tree, and a kamias (bilimbi) tree.
In front of the house was a tree that didn’t bear fruit for years, and then one day it did. Giant golden yellow tear drops hung from its branches, and we were excited to taste them. The way it happened, my older uncle (my mother’s brothers were much younger than her and her sisters, so they were more like my brothers than my uncles) tricked my younger uncle into tasting one. My younger uncle then eagerly waited for me to get home from school and passed on the trauma of eating chesa (canistel or eggfruit) for the first time to me. The thing tasted awful, but don’t take my word for it. Apparently, it’s an acquired taste and the oldies love it.
So, all these ramblings and I still haven’t answered the prompt. My favorite fruits are raspberry, strawberry, pomegranate, fig, and one of the infamous fruits of May – at least, over here. As a kid, cirigüela or sineguelas (Spanish plum) was something I waited for all summer long (ours start in March).
When May finally rolled around, my mom would buy some along with some duhat or Java plum (which I also liked, but it made your teeth fuzzy). I liked it unripe and green as well as ripe and purple. I liked to add salt to counter the tartness or sweetness of the fruit. I still like it, but my summer rituals have slowly dwindled over the years. No longer school-aged, I don’t even like summer anymore. It’s still May though, so for a nostalgic spell, I might buy some sineguelas, duhat, kasoy (fruit not nut), and macopa. That should bring me right back to an ’80s summer.
This Small Life 