A big pile of limes in the market.

So extensive is the use of fresh lime juice in cooking that the stalls usually sell them by the dozen, while the owners of food stalls may purchase a bag holding three or four dozen from the wholesale market. A dozen limes will usually cost around 25 U.S. cents. Such is the importance of limes to Thais that an M.P. felt it necessary to bring to parliament’s attention the fact that the price of limes had exceeded nine Baht (about 30 U.S. cents) during Thailand’s boom years.

In addition to using the juice as an ingredient, many noodle and fried rice dishes are served with a lime wedge as one of the condiments. A squeeze of fresh lime juice over fried rice may not sound delicious, but the taste is quite good.

Limes originated around the Malay peninsula, where they have been cultivated since pre-history.

A pile of mangosteens in the market

Mangosteens are said to have been a favorite of Queen Victoria. She may have been on to something. According to some recent accounts, the mangosteen is one of the richest sources of chemical compounds called Xanthones. These compounds are showing promise in some trials as having many beneficial effects, with some proponents suggesting that the mangosteen could be the next fountain of youth.

Although quite popular throughout Asia, mangosteens are hard to find elsewhere since the trees are slow growing and thus not as economically viable as mango or pineapple. When you do find them, you should know that the skin is quite thick and can also stain quite badly. The best way to peel and serve a mangosteen is to use a knife to cut through the skin around the middle, then lift the top off. The segments can then be easily removed with a fork.

Watermelons fresh – and dirty – from the farm.

In Thailand, watermelon can be grown all year round. It’s one of several fruits you can count on seeing on every fruit platter, along with pineapple, rose apples and guavas. Watermelon is one of the most cooling of all Thai fruits. Nothing quite takes the edge off a spicy meal like a bit of melon. Thais grow the same varieties you will find in most other parts of the world, including melons with yellow flesh as well as the common red type. You’ll find large piles of watermelons on sale in the Muang Mai wholesale market, which lies along the river front just north of the old municipal offices of Chiang Mai. A medium sized whole watermelon may cost as little as 25 U.S. cents. Most of the customers who purchase here are the owners of smaller stalls and restaurants, who will cut up the fruits to serve to their customers. At the fruit carts which ply the street, customers will usually order just a quarter of a melon, which will be sliced into bite sized chunks.

Watermelon is known to flush out accumulation of uric acid in the system, which helps prevent arthritis, gout or uremic poisoning. Also, eruptions on the surface of the skin usually indicate an acidic condition in the blood. This comes from eating too much meat, fried food, sweets and white flour products as well as drinking a lot of soda, etc. Watermelon juice flushes a lot of the acid from the system and renews the blood. When this happens the skin will start looking and feeling better.

Exactly where watermelons were first cultivated is not known for sure. However, it is known that they were grown in ancient Egypt as much as 5,000 years ago. The melons can be seen in paintings and seeds have been found in tombs. It has also been suggested that the Egyptians pickled watermelons as well, although I’m not sure why.

Red rose apples fancily displayed in the market.

Rose apples are eaten skin and all. The texture is somewhere between a watermelon and an apple, as is the taste. Rose apples can have a slightly bitter after-taste, but this is rarely unpleasant. There are several varieties of rose apples, with the most common in Thailand having a light green green skin. This variety is available almost year round, while seasonal varieties vary in color from apple red to almost black. The red variety is native to Malaysia, where its common English name is "Malay apple." In Southern Thailand, you will also see a small cherry red variety that looks a bit like a child’s top.

Mangoes and Sticky Rice

(4 Servings)

Sweet Sticky Rice

Ingredients

Preparation Method

• Before cooking sticky rice, it must first be washed. Rinse the rice in a strainer until the water is clear. Traditional wisdom in Thailand is that it takes three washings to properly clean the dust off the rice.
• Here’s the tricky part: the rice must be soaked overnight (in other words, about eight hours or more) before cooking.
• Next, sticky rice must be steamed, not boiled, so you cannot use a traditional rice cooker unless it has a strainer to keep the water separated from the rice. You also get the best results if the rice is a uniform depth when cooking. I’ve gotten my best results using a round cake pan with a mesh bottom placed in a vegetable steamer. The pan allows the rice to be smoothed to an even depth, while the mesh bottom allows the steam through without letting the rice fall out. Steam the rice about 20 minutes.
• While the rice is cooking, stir together the sugar and coconut cream. It helps dissolve the sugar if you warm the coconut cream for 20 to 30 seconds in the microwave before stirring in the sugar.
• As soon as the rice is cooked, transfer it to a large bowl and pour the sweet coconut cream over it. Stir it to mix and let it set. If you seem to have too much liquid, strain the mixture to remove the excess.
• I think this dish is best when the rice is still just a little bit warm.

Coconut Cream

Ingredients

Preparation Method

• Heat the coconut cream over low heat, then stir in the rice flour and salt. Keep stirring until the mixture begins to thicken, then stir in the sugar. Remove from heat as soon as the sugar is dissolved.

Now, to put it all together, you’ll need the above items plus two ripe mangoes and (optionally) some puffed yellow mung beans (these have a taste and texture like puffed rice, which you could probably use in a pinch).

• Peel the mangoes then cut the meat lengthwise off either side of the large central pit. Further cut the mango into bit-sized pieces and arrange on a plate.
• Spoon some of the sweet sticky rice onto the plate next to the mango.
• Drizzle some of the coconut cream over the rice and the mangoes, then sprinkle some of the mung beans over the rice.

A basket of ripe yellow mangoes at the wholesale market in Chiang Mai

All mangoes have more or less the same flat tear-drop shape. The thing I’m always fascinated with about the mango is the wide flat pit that extends to just below the skin. The flesh of the mango is built up on either side of the pit rather than spread evenly around it as with most other fruits with a core, such as apples, guavas and pears. As one cheeky author of Wikipedia put (before being removed), "Some people believe that the safest way to eat a mango is in the bathtub, or sitting naked on a deserted beach, or even on top of a mango tree itself." Indeed, fresh ripe yellow mangoes are a rather messy affair to peel and slice.

The most popular yellow mangoes have a short season, with the best fruits available only from about March to May, although in recent years various tricks have been employed to extend this to the point where some form of yellow mangoes are available year around. These will be eaten fresh, with the most popular and traditional method being fresh cut mangoes served with sweet sticky rice. At the height of the yellow mango season in May, Chiang Mai holds a Mango Fair in Buak Hat park at the south-western corner of the old city. There’s lots of mango eating of course, and no festival would be complete without a Mango Queen.

"Fresh picked" green mangoes on sale.

Green mangoes are available for a longer season, from as early as October up to May. Green mangoes generally have a tart taste with a crispy texture. They can be quite similar to green apples in both taste and texture; and like green apples, if you eat too many you will be sure to get a tummy ache. Green mangoes are eaten fresh, sometimes with a sticky brown sweet and salty sauce. Green mangoes also find their way into salads and other savory recipes.

The variety of mangoes available in Thailand points to the fact that the fruit originated in South and South-East Asia. They have obviously been cultivated for quite some time. The Hindu Vedas, written about 4000 B.C., refers to mangoes as "the food of the gods" and Buddha was presented with a mango grove in which to rest. The word mango comes from a Portuguese corruption of the Tamil word for the fruit, man-kay. The curved tear-drop shape of mangoes is said to be the inspiration for the paisley pattern in Indian textiles. From Asia, the colonial powers spread mangoes throughout the world. Today, mangoes are said to be the most widely eaten fresh fruit in the world. Mangoes contain significant amounts of vitamins A, B and C.

Beeo Keeo longans on sale in a market.

Longans are also a good source of copper and manganese, which help to maintain healthy hair and skin. Copper is also useful for helping the body to absorb iron, making the longan a good fruit for people who are anemic. Copper also helps to maintain and repair the connective tissues of the heart and arteries.

There are two main varieties of longan sold in the markets. See Chompoo or "pink colored" is the most highly prized. As its name implies, the flesh has a slightly pinkish color to it. The other type, Beeo Keeo, looks similar on the outside, but the flesh is more greenish.

The bigger the Long Tong, the more you pay!

Another fruit looks very similar to the longan, and in Thai it’s known as long tong. Long tongs are larger than longans and generally much sweeter. For this reason, the fruit is usually much more expensive than the longan.

Bunches of litchi on sale in the market.

The litchi, like all its relatives, is a seasonal fruit, ripening between May and August. Longans and Rambutan usually peak a few months later. The bulk of Thailand’s litchi crop is grown around Chiang Mai’s neighbor to the north, Chiang Rai, which was once the "second city" of the Lanna kingdom. Every year around May, Chiang Rai hosts its own "litchi festival" to celebrate the new season’s crop.

In the markets, small stems of the ripe red fruits will usually be bound together with other bunches to form large clusters looking like huge bunches of grapes. These will normally weigh around a kilogram, which when the fruit is in season will set you back around a dollar.

Litchis originated in China, where a Cantonese saying has it that "one litchi equals three torches of fire." This refers to the strong "yang" nature of the fruit. You’ve probably heard of "yin" and "yang" but you might not know that foods could be classified as "yin" – associated with the moon and representing feminine nature – or "yang" – associated with the hot sun and masculine nature. Thus the litchi is thought to "heat" the body, and too much of it could create an "imbalance" in the body’s yin and yang.

Large ripe jackfruits on sale in a Bangkok market.

Jackfruit appears to have originated in western India. It spread through the rest of India and on to South-east Asia. The tree is large and the fruit itself grows not at the tip of limbs but rather out of the trunk. The jackfruit is the largest tree-born fruit in the world. A single pod can reach a length of nearly a meter and weigh close to 40 kilograms. The first place I ever saw a jackfruit tree was within the famous mountain-top temple of Wat Pratat Doi Sutep, just 16 kilometers west of (and more than one kilometer above) Chiang Mai. After climbing the 300 step stairway to the temple from the roadway, one of the first things you’ll see is a jackfruit tree growing in the courtyard outside the compound of the gilded pagoda (chedi) that is the symbol of Chiang Mai. If you’re lucky, you may see a fruit or two growing out of the trunk.

The outer skin of the fruit is thick and covered with stubby pyramidal bumps. Newcomers sometimes mistake jackfruit for a type of durian, but the bumps on the jackfruit are not sharp like the durian. The skin is light green in color, sometimes shifting to yellow in ripe fruit. If the outside looks a bit odd, the inside of the jackfruit is where things get really strange. The large outer skin is really just a sort of sack, containing as many as 500 seed pods attached to a woody center core. The seeds are quite large, but it’s the juicy membrane that surrounds them that is the edible part. The seed sacks are the color of a ripe banana skin, and smell like a mixture of banana and pineapple. The taste is lightly sweet and the texture is fibrous, unlike just about any other fruit. It’s a rather tedious job separating the edible part from the rest of the fruit, but vendors can usually sell them almost as fast as they can extract them. Despite all the work, a half dozen pieces will usually cost around 25 U.S. cents.

In its native India, the jackfruit is the subject of a rather infamous letter, supposedly written in 1909, by an irate passenger on the nation’s railway. Generally referred to as "the jackfruit letter", it recounts how, having eaten a bit too much jackfruit, the passenger had an urgent need to use the station’s facilities. Unfortunately, the guard at the station chose that moment to signal a premature departure of the train from the station, forcing the hapless passenger to rush to re-board the train. In the process he fell down, causing him to, in the words of the letter, “expose my shockings to man, females, woman on platform.” The letter supposedly helped to spur the installation of toilets on the Indian trains, although some argue that it’s an urban legend.

Guavas on sale in a market – with a spritz of water to make them more appealing.

The fruit’s Thai name can occasionally give birth to a bit of giggling over double meanings. The Thai name – farang – is also the Thai word for western foreigners. You can imagine the jokes that get made about ‘eating foreigners’ etc. The name gives away the fact that guavas are not native to Thailand. Like so many fruits and vegetables, we owe their introduction to the Spanish and Portuguese, who spread the fruit from the new world throughout the tropics.

In its native Amazonian rain-forest, the fruit and the tree it comes from have many medicinal uses, most commonly for diarrhea and dysentery. It’s also said that chewing the leaves before drinking can prevent hangovers. More scientifically, guava contains more vitamin C than citrus, and is rich in other vitamins as well as tannins, phenols, flavonoids and other good for you stuff.

The fruit often seems ubiquitous, appearing at all stalls and markets. Guavas must be eaten fresh, once cut the flesh begins getting mushy within a few hours. If kept refrigerated, they will last a day or two. You may also notice that the juice from the guava can stain your fingers brown if you eat it with your hands. It doesn’t wash off easily but does wear off within a day or two. Given this property, it should come as no surprise that guava tannins can be used to tan leather or dye fabrics.

One of the reasons for guava’s popularity is its low cost and wide availability. In the wholesale market, a full dozen may cost you less than 30 U.S. cents. If you purchase a fruit from a cart, the owner will slice it up in wedges for you. Most of them use an odd sort of knife with a wide corrugated blade that has its handle along the back of the blade. The fruit seller will quickly and deftly push the knife into the fruit and then give it just a tiny twist to separate a section. They can have a whole fruit cut up in just seconds. The fruit wedges will be tossed into clear plastic food bag, which the vendor will usually put into another small light weight plastic shopping bag along with a packet containing a mixture of sugar, salt and hot dried chili and one or two bamboo skewers to help you eat the fruit. All this extra service costs a bit more. You may pay ten cents or more for a whole fruit.