Custard Apple

We enjoy a variety of fruits throughout the year, each having its own distinct flavour and nutritional profile. We also love the rare taste of many exotics fruits available in our land, one of them being custard apple. Commonly known as ramphal, sharifa or sitaphal in India, custard apple finds favour with many fruit lovers for its sweet taste and creamy texture, which gives it the apt title of 'custard'. Custard apple has a green-coloured hard exterior, which turns brown as the fruit ripens. Inside the hard shell is white-coloured soft flesh that stores a number of oval-shaped seeds. To eat the fruit, the flesh is scooped out of the skin and then the black seeds are separated and discarded as they are inedible.

History

Custard apple is said to have originated from West India, but the fruit was carried through Central America to southern Mexico. For a long time, the custard apple was grown and naturalized in countries like Peru and Brazil. Proof suggests that these fruits have been grown in the Bahamas, Bermuda and southern Florida. This fruit rapidly spread across tropical Africa around the 17th century and was grown in South Africa as a dooryard fruit tree. In India, the custard apple was prevalent in parts of Kolkata. Eventually, it gained popularity on the east coast of Malaya, south-east Asia and the Philippines. 80 years ago, custard apples were found in abundance in Guam, a region off the western Pacific Ocean.

Fruits

The compound fruit is sub globose, heart shaped, ovate or conical, 5–10 cm (2.0–3.9 in) in diameter and 6–10 cm (2.4–3.9 in) long, weighing on the average 100–240 g (3.5–8.5 oz.), but the largest fruits may reach 5 pounds in weight. Fruit is normally greenish-yellow (or pinkish- purple in a purplish cultivar) when ripe. The skin is thin but tough, may be smooth with fingerprint-like markings or covered with conical or rounded protuberances. The sweet, juicy, creamy white colored flesh is melting, sub acid and very fragrant. The fruit is of a primitive form with spirally arranged carpels, resembling a raspberry. Each segment of flesh surrounds blackish or dark brown seed, ellipsoid to obovoid, 1–1.4 cm, shiny and smooth. The fruit size is generally proportional to the number of seeds within. They ripen from October to May.

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Growth Habit

Custard apple is a small, fast growing, and semi-deciduous evergreen tree, briefly deciduous in California from February through April. The tree can reach 3–8 m or more, but is fairly easily restrained with a short trunk, broad, open crown and irregularly spreading branches. It is found growing in a tropical or sub-tropical climate with summer temperatures and tolerates a wide variety of soils. It has performed well on sand, oolitic limestone, heavy loam with good drainage and in rich, well-drained, deep rocky soils. But it prefers friable, sandy loams. Growth is in one long flush, beginning in April. The roots commence as taproot, but the slow-growing root system is rather weak, superficial, and ungreedy. Young plants need staking.

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Leaves and Flowers

The attractive leaves are single and alternate, 2 to 8 inches long and up to 4 inches wide. They are dark green on top and velvety green on the bottom, with prominent veins. New growth is recurved, like a fiddle-neck. Axillary buds are hidden beneath fleshy leaf petioles. Lamina narrowly elliptic to oblong or lanceolate, 5–17 × 2.5–6 cm, base broadly cuneate to rounded, apex acute to obtuse.

Fragrant flowers are borne solitary or in groups of 2 or 3 on short, hairy stalks along the branches. They appear with new growth flushes, continuing as new growth proceeds and on old wood until midsummer. The flowers are made up of three fleshy, greenish-brown, oblong, downy outer petals and three smaller, pinkish inner petals. They are perfect but dichogamous, lasting about two days, and opening in two stages, first as female flowers for approximately 36 hours and later as male flowers. The flower has a declining receptivity to pollen during the female stage and is unlikely to be pollinated by its own pollen in the male stage.