After quite
a long gap it has been, I am writing, and this time, it is a post about my
experiences with the speciality food of Mahabaleshwar, a hill-station in Maharashtra I visited very recently. And by speciality
food, here, I mean to refer to the kind of food Mahabaleshwar tops in—fruit
products.
When you
are in Maharashtra , you think of strawberries
when you think of Mahabaleshwar. While it is true by all means that I enjoyed
eating ‘strawberry-and-cream’—a local concoction consisting of strawberries—albeit
frozen this time of the year—(“off-season,” the seller complained), strawberry
ice-cream, fresh cream and strawberry syrup (which I guessed was
artificial), what came to me as a
surprise was the part including mulberries. Two things that I knew before about
mulberries included the fact that silk-worm rearing is done usually on mulberry
trees, and that ‘the mulberry bush’ featured in a nursery rhyme I recited in
nursery school, and I did NOT know how they looked (and I thus mistook them at
first for grapefruit). Nevertheless, what matters is that they taste great, and
leave behind an almost indelible magenta juice.
 |
| A raw mulberry |
I also
visited a jams-jellies-preserves factory outlet, Mala’s, where they offered
free tastings of almost every crush (in milk) they had on sale. While I tasted
only strawberry and butterscotch (my sister and I regret not having tasted
more) and they did not have saffron, I loved butterscotch—it had grated apple,
and tasted yum. Practically every bottle of crush of every flavour on sale there
had fruit pieces in it, not like ground-and-got-done-with-it. Their fudges were
very good (I hadn’t tasted good fudges at all before, for refrigeration—and I
have warned my aunt against it—kills fudges).
If you have
an uh, well, not a sweet tooth, but a fruit-tooth, you know what is that place
you would want to head to. Happy fruiting!
