The Tropical Fruit of Sri Lanka: A Season by Season Guide

The tropical fruit available in Sri Lanka across the year is one of the quiet pleasures of being here. The mangoes alone are worth a visit timed around the season. The rambutan, the wood apple, the mangosteen, the jak, the durian that appears occasionally from the south, the tiny sweet bananas that bear no resemblance to the cavendish sold in European supermarkets: all of this is available fresh, cheap, and at a quality that reflects a growing tradition that has not been industrialised.

Mangoes come in over fifty varieties in Sri Lanka and the season runs roughly from March to June. The Karthacolomban is the one that gets talked about most: large, almost fibreless, with a sweet-acid balance that is close to perfect. The TJC and Rata Amba varieties are smaller and denser and deeply sweet in a way that makes them better for eating out of hand. Buy them from a roadside stall during season when they are ripe, not from a supermarket where they have been sitting.

Wood apple, or divul in Sinhala, is the Sri Lankan fruit that surprises foreigners most. It looks like a cricket ball, smells intensely aromatic when cracked open, and the flesh inside is dark brown, sticky, and intense with a sourness that is cut with either sugar or jaggery when eaten. Stirred into a drink with water and sweetened, it becomes one of the most refreshing things available. Try it from a wood apple stall in any town market.

The jak fruit, or polos when unripe, is the largest tree fruit in the world and every part of it is used here. Young jak is cooked in curries as a vegetable. Ripe jak is eaten fresh, its segments intensely sweet and slightly sticky. Jak seeds are boiled or roasted. The dried flesh is used in snacks. Walking through a jak tree that has fruit the size of a small child hanging directly from the trunk is one of the genuinely surreal pleasures of the Sri Lankan countryside.