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The red fruit certainly fit our mental image of cherries, but they are actually karanda, a.k.a Bengal currant or Christ’s thorn. Native to India, Burma, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, the straggly shrubs that carry this fruit are a common hedge plant in Asia. The fruit, in clusters of 3 to 10, is broad-ovoid to round, has thin but tough purplish-red skin that turns dark-purple or nearly black when ripe. Artificial additives are responsible for the bright red colour of packaged fruit.

The ripe fruits have a mildly acidic taste and can be eaten out of hand. However, even ripe natural karandas are not as sweet as the supermarket ones, which get their syrupy taste from being stewed in sugar.

The raw green fruit have a sharp taste and are ideal for making pickles. Slightly under-ripe fruit are made into jelly. Deseeded fruit, seasoned with cloves and sugar, are a popular ingredient in cakes, tarts and pies. The juice extracted by boiling the fruit adds colour, body and taste to fruit beverages.

As for nutrition, 100 gm of the ripe fruit contains 75 Calorie. The figures are obviously a lot higher for the sugared variety. The fruit is rich in dietary fibre and Vitamin C.

Karanda leaves are fodder for silkworms. Paste from the ground-up root is an insect repellent. The astringent raw fruit find use in the tanning and dyeing industry.

As with gooseberries and lime, sailors ate the raw fruit to prevent scurvy. They also used the fruit to treat indigestion. The leaf decoction was a popular remedy for fever, diarrhoea, oral ulcers and ear infections.

The roots contain salicylic acid and cardiac glycosides. The former is the natural version of aspirin, but most people will find it easier to swallow the pill. Except as a natural source of Vitamin C, there are no approved medicinal uses of the karanda fruit in modern medicine.

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