The recent trend of people trying to find the goodness in all our local vegetables and fruits has helped the simple and delicious jackfruit as also curry leaves to get their due at last. Their medicinal value makes us understand why our elders were not affected by the many lifestyle diseases. After leaving Bombay in the early seventies to settle in Kanhangad, Kerala, I saw huge jackfruits. Back in Bombay, we would buy pods of the huge fruit and get only a piece or two as it had to be divided among us four kids. And how we loved the juicy fruits and hoped for more! But here in Kanhangad, there was jackfruit, jackfruit, everywhere and one could have the lot, at one’s will and pleasure.
But one thing that surprised me was while I went completely overboard eating jackfruit in all its forms, raw and ripe, the locals hardly looked at it, let alone eat it, saying it created gas in the stomach. We had, in our plot, a tree producing nearly a hundred jackfruits annually. We were at a loss as to how to consume them. The servants wanted nothing to do with the fruits even if we were ready to pay them to cart away the whole lot for free! Then I decided to fry the raw jackfruit and consume it with pulses. The raw jackfruit can also be cleaned and stocked with piles of salt and filled in porcelain jars, bound with cloth, kept for months and opened later. Thus the fruit was consumed until it turned ripe.
Then it was consumed as halwa. No plant will survive under a jackfruit tree as its leaves retard any green growth under its shade. But the same leaves can be used as containers to steam rice dumplings after they are woven as cups using toothpicks to bind them. Today, that old heavy jackfruit-bearing tree has long been cut down (the wood is heavily priced ) to provide the furniture for our house. But now, there is another jackfruit tree in our plot which provides all that is needed for my family. And strange to say, we all love it as do our grandchildren.
Today, each good-quality fruit can fetch `100 to `150 in the markets of Mumbai and Chennai and even in small towns, those settled abroad are ready to spend through their nose to get a beautiful and ripe jackfruit. So I feel happy for those who sell jackfruit and even happier that the neglected, heavy, prickly and sweet-smelling fruit has finally found businessmen ready to tap into its great potential. Whether the jack of all fruits will soon become the king or queen of fruits, only time will tell.