Home › The Guava › Six Familiar Fruits
Six Familiar Fruits
some of the latter of which grow to the size of a small melon. It was named, it is said, by the early Spaniards for the pomegranate, or "granada." It is often served uncooked with wine and sugar. Where jelly is made of this or the May-pop, the ripe fruit, halved across, should be covered with cold water, adding about one-third the quantity of well filled out but still immature, green-skinned fruit. Cook slowly for three-quarters of an hour, then add a little cold water and simmer again for an hour. Strain off the juice (which should by this time be well cooked down), and proceed as for ordinary fruit jelly. (See previous recipes.) Marmalade may be made by using the pulp of the fruit, putting through a colander or sieve, cooking down, and adding sugar. The resulting colour of jelly or marmalade is a pale yellow.
The famous Tamarind Tree (Tamarindus Indica) has delicate leaves and pink and white flowers succeeded by edible pods which are preserved and used in confections, beverages, and medicinally. The acid of the fresh tamarind is very pleasing, and is a combination of citric, malic, formic, butyric, and tartaric acids, the tartness being given chiefly by the citric. The laxative and cooling qualities make the tamarind considered of much value in many cases of illness and certainly in the prevention of it. Tamarinds are usually shipped from the East or West Indies in some form of preserve though with a little more care it is said they might be had more abundantly in the market in fresh form, if the shell or pod were prevented from breaking, for with this natural protection they keep well for some months. With the pods removed the tamarind may be preserved by pouring boiling syrup over the fruit or by placing in stone jars with alternate layers of sugar. They may be also candied and made into syrup for use in various summer drinks, though now known chiefly as a valued drink in fevers. The tamarind perhaps may be likened to the lemon and also somewhat to the grape. It has a good percentage of bitartrate of potassa, its other components (besides the acids) being gum, pectin, water, and pulpy matter.
The Bread Fruit Tree (Artocarpus incisa, or A. communis) bears for eight months in succession its generous balls of pulp which are so useful as a food to so many tropical peoples. It is prepared in various ways for eating, one of the most common methods being to bake it with a bit of fat meat in the centre of the fruit. It tastes something like potato as well as somewhat resembling bread.
Buried in a page of tropical-fruit description are workable directions for guava jelly and guava marmalade. The method is sound but assumes you already know the standard jelly procedure the book gave earlier, and it never states a sugar quantity.
- The hinge: underripe fruit is the pectinThe instruction to add about one-third green-skinned, immature fruit to the ripe halves is the reason this sets. Immature fruit carries more pectin and acid than fully ripe, and ripe fruit alone will tend to give syrup rather than jelly.
- Sugar is unstated'Proceed as for ordinary fruit jelly' refers back to earlier recipes not reproduced here. Standard practice is to measure the strained juice and add roughly an equal volume of sugar, then boil to the jell point, 220F at sea level or until it sheets from a spoon. For the marmalade, about three-quarters cup sugar per cup of sieved pulp is a reasonable starting point, adjusted for sweetness.
- May-popThe maypop is Passiflora incarnata, the hardy North American passionflower, whose egg-sized fruit was a common southern hedgerow jelly. It is treated here alongside the granadilla because both are passionflower fruits handled the same way.
- Seeds and strainingThe seeds should not go through into the marmalade. Press the cooked pulp through a colander first, then a finer sieve; for the jelly, let the bag drip and do not squeeze it or the jelly clouds.
- The two-stage cookingThree-quarters of an hour, a splash of cold water, then an hour more is a long extraction typical of the period. It is doing the work a modern cook does with a shorter simmer and added pectin. The text notes the finished colour is a pale yellow.
- Keeping itThe original says nothing about sealing; jelly of this period was commonly poured hot into glasses and covered with paraffin. Refrigerate it instead, or follow a current water-bath canning guide for the jar times.
- The rest of the pageThe tamarind and breadfruit passages are description, not instruction. The tamarind note about pouring boiling syrup over shelled pods, or layering them with sugar in stone jars, is a sketch rather than a recipe and gives no proportions.
The fruit the page says the Spaniards named for the pomegranate, granada, is the granadilla -- a passionflower fruit, which is why the May-pop (Passiflora incarnata) is named beside it and why some of them are said to reach the size of a small melon. Granadilla is a diminutive of granada, so the page's account is the standard one rather than a doubtful tradition; the Taino guayaba etymology belongs to the guava, a different fruit. The tamarind entry, with its list of acids and its praise of the pulp as cooling and laxative in fevers, belongs to an older tradition, in which tamarind was a pharmacy item as much as a food; it entered Western medical use through Arab traders long before it appeared in cookbooks. Breadfruit is here for the reason it appears in nineteenth-century fruit compendia: the Bligh voyages made it a byword for a plant moved across the world to feed people cheaply, and the comparison to potato and bread was how writers explained a starchy fruit to readers who had never seen one.