Remember when after a meal, dessert used to be fruit? Growing up in a place with an abundant variety of fruits, they were readily available to satisfy everyone’s sweet tooth. Cookies and candy bars were rare treats. Sodas (we called them soft drinks) were sometimes split between two people. And by the way, the cookies we had were similar to the Nilla wafers nowadays. We had no chocolate chip, peanut butter, sugar, oatmeal raisin cookies then. Doughnuts were homemade and they were just plain which you dipped in sugar.
I don’t know if I can remember all the fruits we had available then, but I’ll try. Most of these are sweet fruits but some of them are sour which you dip in salt, preferably (for me) salt with freshly crushed red peppers. Durian, mangosteen, lanzones or buwahan, langka or nangka, marang, mango, mampalam, star apple, carambola, atis, coconut, banana (smaller yellow ones), papaya, oranges (what were the small oranges called?), tambis, camias, grapefruit, wani, baunu, pineapple, tambis, macopa, santol, and guavas. Grapes, Sunkist oranges, and apples were only available in a grocery store and were expensive because they couldn’t be grown locally. My Tausug friends, if you can add any more fruits from the place where we grew up in, which I forgot about, please do.
Unfortunately nowadays, an after meal sweet would probably be chocolate bars, or cookies, or ice cream, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I like PB&J). If had pies or cakes here, I would probably have that too, so it’s good that I don’t buy them. Even if the fruits I mentioned above were available here, it would probably be very hard to wean myself away from the refined sugars that I’ve gotten used to, but it could be possible. Make those fruits available to me and I’ll turn a new leaf, or in this case a new but old dessert of childhood.
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