Had wood apple yet?

“Wood apple! Where do you get them?” asked a friend on Instagram, high on memories of her childhood.

My own search for wood apples, or bael, this summer, was driven by nostalgia; I am not a fan of the fruit. There used to be a tree on a road, visible from our home in Guwahati. Everyone passing that tree would either open an umbrella or run past, to avoid being hit by a falling fruit. During summer holidays, we enjoyed watching people run by when they passed that tree.

Nostalgia is a strong force: I found myself wanting to crack a fruit open, just to remind myself of what it looked like inside. I also wanted to smell the strong, sugary yet musky aroma of the fruit, because it seemed to be fading from memory.

A whack with a hand grinding stone cracked the shell. Having opened it, I took a photo of what was inside and posted it on my Instagram. And just like that, my inbox was flooded with notes and memories of childhood from various friends.

Most of them remembered its sweetness, and the strong funky smell which made it an amazing ingredient for a summer sherbet. It is a heavy sherbet, I agree. Almost like a smoothie. Another friend remembered how, most of the time, sherbet made with bael was sweetened with sugar or pounded jaggery.

The memories weren’t restricted to sherbet alone. A few echoed my sentiments, “Didn’t like the bael at all as a child. But as an adult, I seem to be craving for it.”

The season and the fruit made a few others recollect their summer holidays. A food writer recollected his ritual with his grandfather, “I used to hate it as a kid, but miss it now. My grandfather used to make sit and take out the pulp and separate the fibre. It was a tedious ritual.”

In his book Xahajlabhya Bon Dorobor Gun, Assamese herbal medicine expert Gunaram Khanikar mentions the benefits of bael. The book, a go-to health journal in all Assamese homes, mentions a brew made of dried slivers of the tender bael to treat stomach ailments.

Bael is also known by different names: monkey fruit, golden apple, and Japanese bitter orange. A bounce test helps determine a ripe fruit. Drop it on a hard surface — if it bounces, the fruit is unripe. A ripe fruit will fall with a thud to the ground. Fully ripe wood apples have a light brown to a toffee brown tone flesh.