The small red interior of the Señorita guava (Psidium guajava) is what sets it apart from other varieties of guava. We were told later that the best guava jellies were made from that guava variety. The jelly came in tin cans, our favourite as children, which we wiped generously on our sandwich bread. Talking to classmates and friends later revealed how all of us loved the same guava jelly, one of them even licking the jelly that oozed out of the holes of her Skyflakes saltine cracker.

A late bloomer fan of Señorita guava was my younger son who couldn’t get enough of the fruit from his Wawa’s (grandmother) garden. So he looked for a stick, an improvised fruit picker, a sungkit, to get more of his new discovery.

Fruits that I miss also bring to mind my father who introduced my siblings and I to many of those, fruits he grew up with in his hometown of Bauang, La Union. I remembered him when I saw this huge hardwood tree called kamagong (Diospyros blancoi) in an aunt’s yard. The red fruits were inviting and when I had a taste after so many years, I laughed remembering how my father enticed his children to eat what he called “the local apple”, the mabolo (Diospyrus blancoi, velvet apple).

He introduced us to chico (Sapodilla) only because there was a small tree growing at the doorway of our house. The brown fruit was also brown inside, the sweetness quite subtle but there. And it punished those of us who took the fruit before it had time to ripen by its grainy, terribly astringent taste.

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My father’s favourite was the guyabano (Annona muricata, soursop) and his eyes would light up when there were some to be bought then at the supermarket. He ate with gusto and didn’t like the guyabano juice his children preferred. He also didn’t care when told that guyabano was considered a health food and just smiled when my younger sister, a Maryknoll nun in Panama, told him that the fruit was called guanabana in her new home.

My maternal grandmother was a whiz at gardening, which was why there were so many plants and trees around her house. The lone aratiles (Muntingia calabura Linn, cherry tree) was our centre of attention in the summer and each of us already reserved one of the green fruits on its branches, teaching us to be patient as we waited forever for our reserved fruit to turn red and taste its sweet juicy inside.

Beside grandma’s house was a huge santol (Sandoricum koetjape, cotton fruit) tree. They weren’t the sweetest kind but when the fruits were ripe, the family of uncles, cousins and siblings would mill around it and extract the seeds to eat or pare the fruit to leave a little of the brown skin which suffered many shallow slashes with a knife and doused with salt. My grandfather who we hardly heard talk would scare all of us that if we swallowed the seeds, they would germinate in our stomachs and would grow out of our ears and nostrils. Of course, the boys in the family never listened but the girls were sufficiently horrified.

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My grandmother also had atis (Annona squamosa, sugar apple) and langka (Artocarpus heterophyllus, jackfruit) in her small plot by the driveway. She would admonish us not to point at those trees while fruiting because, she said, this would cause them to shrivel and die. When the langka was nearly ripe, she had the gardener wrap the fruit with rice sacks probably to protect it from birds who peck at it and from little children who point at it.

How sad that if you wanted ripe sampaloc (Tamarindus indica, tamarind) today, groceries and fruit stalls will give you Thai tamarind. The absence of the fruit has gotten so bad that Susie’s in Pampanga who does Pampango traditional treats and rice cakes no longer makes their excellent sweetened sampaloc where the fruit is cooked in sweetness without the covering, and look as if they were just peeled. One friend who is concerned about the sampaloc’s disappearance gave me the fruit from her farm with the proviso that the seeds should be planted then given to other friends who have the space for it, a backyard or a farm. The seeds have grown into small stems with the unmistakable cluster of leaves, waiting to be replanted because they do grow into huge beautiful trees reminding me of that time when sampaloc trees used to line the sidewalks of our neighbourhood, which is why the street was called Sampaloc Avenue. When it became Morato Avenue, those trees all disappeared.

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Lanzones (Lansium parasiticum) is another fruit that’s been missing. Whatever you can find are only in small quantities that don’t taste like the lanzones you’ve had before. And before, they came in a tiklis, another kind of woven fruit basket, usually from Paete. But when I was in Mindanao, in Tawi-tawi to be exact, those were huge pieces taken from wild growing trees in the mountains, placed in woven coconut palm leaves that you want to preserve but can’t. But those weren’t as sweet as the Paete variety.

But thankfully, some grocery fruit stalls carry the caimito (Chrysophyllum cainto) in season although in limited quantities. We were asked which of the two varieties we prefer—the violet-coloured or the green. My preference is the green because it’s milkier but any of the two will do because the fruit is too missed.

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Hardly a fruit of my childhood, the marang (Artocarpus odoratissima) was introduced to me only when I taught in Mindanao. For those unfamiliar with it, it can be described as a small langka with aromatic coated seeds within. It was such a favourite but difficult to bring to Manila when I wanted to introduce it to my family and friends because its shelf life is so short. When I told a friend in Mindanao how I loved the fruit, she looked at me strangely because she said no one in Mindanao minds the fruit, that the marang would just fall off the tree and no one would get fruit. She said there were better fruits to be had like mangosteen, durian and rambutan. She couldn’t convince me, of course.

Like the marang, the pajo or paho (Mangifera altissima) was never part of my childhood memories. Instead, they came late to my life, introduced by friends in the food writing community. My mates would point out the trees when we went to Batangas telling me how the trees grow wild and somehow refused to be part of a plantation. Food historian Felice Sta Maria wrote how the pajo, looking like tiny green mangoes, was a substitute for the absent olives for the Spanish rulers in our country. The pajo is a favourite pickled fruit but also very expensive.

These fruits are sorely missed at the stalls, and they are better than all those imported varieties. While shiny and succulent, they don’t speak of our past, our childhood, our country.

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