October 23, 2009

Buah Ma or Pulasan




A small tree but it is producing good number of fruits for the family. Three of these trees are fruiting in the garden. Just nice for family consumption.



The fruits turn out to be crunchy . Really easy to bite - and nothing will stick between the teeth so to speak. Ny watch is there. Unfortunately the photo is over exposed because of the midday sun.



Very sweet and big buah ma is a favourite fruit amongst the Ibans. Most of the buah ma sold in towns like Sibu are on the sour and softer side. They also do not peel off easily from the seed. The seeds of these buah ma happen to be very small. So the people who sold the seedlings were actually truthful and honest.

A favourite of wild boars this fruit when in season can attract a whole bunch of these wild animals from as far as Indonesida. Some wild boars have been known to swim across a river as big as the Rajang to eat the fruits.

But with wild fruits diminishing together with the thick equatorial rainforest due to over lumbering the migration of wild boars has become a thing of the past.

Today most buah ma are grown in small family plots and are from grafted seedlings. To me they taste better than the wild jungle fruit of yesteryears.

10 comments:

Ah Ngao said...

i loves this ! we used to call it hairless rambutans or botak rambutans,..haha

wenn said...

i love it..

Ann, Chen Jie Xue 陈洁雪 said...

Came via Adirya Kiratas's post on pace maker. So how are you feeling now?

This fruit, when we were little, my mum's side lived near to the Ibans in Durin. They called this SEE BOW fruit, which we took that Sibu was name after this fruit.

Some 5 years ago, I was in a fruit market in Singapore, I was so pleased to see them. The vendor told me it is a new fruit. ( I wanted to say my _____, I ate them when I was a kid.)

Nevertheless, I bought a whole lot to distribute to all my neighbours in NTU from all over the world. I told them even if they are not very nice, they are my Sibu fruit.

This July when I went to Singapore and west malaysia, they were selling them again. People in small town Malaya were growing it . It has become very popular, I don't know why, it is hard to twist it open. The only reason I bought them again was to distribute them again to my International friends, these are "Sibu" fruits."

I photographed them, but haven't got around to post them.

I believe the scientist must have done something to them to make them a bigger version of our SEE BOW fruit.

I was so proud of the mutated SEE BOW fruit. Though, I prefer the rambutan.

Ensurai said...

Ah Ngao..Nice of you to share. Now I know more.

thanks for your interest.

Ensurai said...

Wenn
How nice to hear from you!

Hope you will have the blessings of eating more buah ma in the future.

Ensurai said...

Hi Ann
Wow...that's a beautiful sharing from you. I have forgotten that this fruit is also called buah sibau or Sibu fruit...(shame on me)...I am so in love with the new breed that I continue to call it buah ma...

The tree is rather small...may be I shall grow some more and see if I could get the bigger breeds...my local vendor is very experimental...and she (and her husband) keep pushing new species ...now I may not have enough space..thinking of cutting down some of the useless mangoes now.

love
cy

Frank Juhas said...

To assume that the name of Sibu came from sibau is indeed very tempting.However, all the British administrators under the Rajahs were very familiar with the Iban language and many of them spoke it quite well. It is unlikely that when they formed a new district and named an important town, they would make a mistake like that. On the other hand Sibu is an old Malay place name on the semenanjung: like Pulau Sibu in Johor etc...

As for the different species. Of course these are not Sibau fruits (those are hairy)but even with Buah Ma' (Iban) there are several different species: like Buah Pangkal (Iban) or Buah Kalas (Iban) based on the size of the knobs on the skin. They all have different scientific names as well.

Frank

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