Fruit Power!

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!