Yellow mombins

in #life6 years ago (edited)

How can I ever tell the stories of my childhood without yellow mombins? From my primary school days when the trees stand gloriously at the edge of the school playground or my secondary school days with too many of the trees in the school compound, the smell filling the air, making us wish the class was over so we can have the delicious fruits to ourselves.

image
Source

The exciting part is the sourness, God paid so much attention to details in creating nature. This fruit gives you a double thrill; the sweetness and the sourness. We'd eat it so much that our teeth starts to ache, yet, we will go back to it.

Telling you I knew it was called yellow mombins all along would be a lie, I didn't know until a friend posted its picture recently and that picture took me down memory lane. I'm a Yoruba girl and we call it iyeye (yeye for short) or ekinkan (the name is descriptive of the sourness).

Asides the fact that this fruit is yummy, so many lessons were learnt from gathering it. Some of which are;

  1. You have to be a team player. Picture a bunch of 5-9 years old kids trying to reach a 50 metres tall tree, what comes to your mind? Impossible! We would usually allow the strongest and or best climbers go up the tree(s) and throw down the fruits while we catch them. It is very important to catch them because the really ripe ones will break if it hits the ground.

  2. Calculation skills. We learnt to share the fruits according to your work and rank (lol). The climbers get more, the pickers a little lesser and the well wishers a few.

  3. Friendship. While waiting for our climbers or during the picking, lots of stories are told. This is especially fun in the evenings when all of us from our different homes and schools meet at the trees to get our evening dose (I call it dose because it seemed like we wouldn't be able to live without it).

Little did we know we were doing ourselves and our parents a huge favour with our love for the fruit. It has a lot of nutritional benefits which includes;

  1. The fruit is a good diuretic.
  2. The bark of the tree is a good astringent and used to treat diarrhea, dysentery, gonorrhoea, among others.
  3. The leaves and flowers are boiled and used to treat stomach ache, cystitis, urethresis and many more.
    Read more here
  4. It also has antipyretic properties.

It has so many other uses:

  • As jam
  • As tropical juice
  • In ice cream
  • in syrups

If you come across yellow mombins around you, eat one for me🤗

Do you know this fruit? What is it called in your language/dialect?


I am @bookoons, reminding you today to Make A Difference!

Sort:  

Hi @bookoons! I have never heard of yellow mombin, but they look delicious ;) I love your childhood memories and lessons attached to them too!

I found your post because @botefarm featured it in a contest for which I am the judge. Please feel free to join in next week :)

Thank you for visiting.
Yellow mombins have other names like Spondias or hog plum. I'll be sure to join the next contest.

Glad to hear it @bookoons! I'm from Canada, but in Mexico now; I wonder if they have that fruit here?

I think @dipoabasch is right.. this is something similar to kedondong in our country but I need to dig more about this because we have so many kind of kedondong but not all of it is edible or maybe we've never try to eat it because parents didn't taught us about it. I remember that I have had bought one small tree for my garden but it didn't survived because the goats really love it leaves too.. hahaha. thank you for sharing this @bookoons, found your post from @botefarm entry post for the pay it forward contest this week

This Comment Protected by @dustsweeper

Hello! I find your post valuable for the wafrica community! Thanks for the great post! We encourage and support quality contents and projects from the West African region.
Do you have a suggestion, concern or want to appear as a guest author on WAfrica, join our discord server and discuss with a member of our curation team.
Don't forget to join us every Sunday by 20:30GMT for our Sunday WAFRO party on our discord channel. Thank you.

Its been years i tasted this thing. The world has changed, everyone now wants a pizza.

Did you say Pizza? mmm love my Pizza....lol.

Thanks for featuring this post in your Pay It Forward Curation Entry.

Now I've eaten a fairly wide range of fruits, but never heard of yellow mombins. Wonder if it's something you can get in the US.

It is a tropical tree native to the West Indies and tropical Americas, I don't know if you have it in the US. Here in Nigeria, I've not heard of it being cultivated, it grows wildly.

Thanks for the feature.

hello dear @bookoons, do you still have the picture of that tree from your childhood around? I think this fruit is something we called as kedondong in my country, is the seed inside hard and thorny? we usually eat this fruit as salad with hot peanut and caramel sauce while it still half ripen. but we don't climb the tree :D we used to use a long pole to pick it up, merely because it's to high for the kid to climb up.

found your post through @botefarm entry post for the pay it forward contest this week, thank you for sharing this with us

I do not at the moment but I'll look around and get the picture. Yes, the seed is hard and thorny but if you chew it long enough, it becomes soft. I remember the seed having a woody/grainy pattern. If you have a picture of the tree in your country, kindly share, let me confirm it.

Need to go somewhere else to find the picture, it a seasonal fruits I think, it's been so long not finding it around my neighborhood, but I think it's the same fruit probably from a different variety.

I found a picture on wikipedia, link is in the writeup above.

Congratulations @bookoons! You have completed the following achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

Award for the total payout received

Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
SteemitBoard World Cup Contest - Play-off for third result


Participate in the SteemitBoard World Cup Contest!
Collect World Cup badges and win free SBD
Support the Gold Sponsors of the contest: @good-karma and @lukestokes


Do you like SteemitBoard's project? Then Vote for its witness and get one more award!

Been a very long time i ate this too. It reminds me of old friends from Secondary school. I think its calked Ugheghe in my town. It has not been changed. Hahaha

Lol. Please keep some for me when you get it.

Wow i know this, since my childhood i haven't seen it again. We call it tutuvuru.

I bet you can't pronounce that

I just pronounced it...tutuvuru.

😂😂😂

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70597.89
ETH 3559.60
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.77