Breadfruit pudding: A Maldives botanical berry folklore mystery

By M.U. Samuel

This is an extremely sweet dish which was introduced to me by a Maldivian friend during one of my many visits to the amazing Maldives.

Called "Banbu-keyo" in Maldivian native language Dhivehi, the suffix is common to other crops such as "Dhon-keyo", the term for bananas.

Cutting the breadfruit into minute cube-like blocks is tedious work but my friend's mom insisted to prepare it to give a taste for me - and also to her family who adore this tasty local traditional dessert which I suspect could actually be an exclusively Maldivian ingenuity.

It contains just two ingredients - breadfruit and sugar which is cooked after mixing them.

The unadulterated fresh coconut milk, with no added sugar, which we have the option to mix when eating the dish, is only a private choice depending on one's personal taste: it tastes nice when mixed but the pudding without any milk is awesome, too.

Breadfruit actually has an interesting story to tell as far as Maldives' folklore is concerned.

Like one of my Sri Lankan friends' family could not offer me any reason not to eat unripe mangoes, except to say "not good", I am of the view that there must be a reason for Maldivians of a bygone 2,000-year-old history, to avoid breadfruit consumption until the taboo of consuming it was broken somehow.

Like Sri Lankans' inexplicable aversion to unripe mangoes, according to my Maldivian friend's relatives, there was no knowledge as to why Maldivians considered breadfruits as poisonous. The neighboring Sri Lankans don't consider unripe mangoes as poisonous and my friend's family allowed me to pick them from the tree in their garden but ancient Maldivians seem to have gone to the extent of perceiving breadfruit as a health hazard, and this is what brings a twist to the folklore tale of what broke the Maldivian taboo on eating breadfruit.

We have to appreciate the experiments of our ancestors, sometimes with deadly outcomes through trial and error to distinguish between what's edible and what's not, and what's good as herbal cures and what's not. We wouldn't have medications such as Ayurvedic treatment, which originated in India more than 3,000 years ago, if our ancestors did not take the risks so that us descendants could live a prolonged healthy life. Just imagine our ancestors mistakenly tasting the wrong type of berry or mushroom in the wild because of a lack of pre-existing knowledge and consequently falling dead!

According to the breadfruit legend of Maldives' folklore, once upon a time, there was an elderly lady who found that as each day passed, she was losing all her extended family members one by one and she ended up living all alone.

The neighbors then started taking care of her but they also passed away while the old lady's life deteriorated to the extent that she was not getting proper food.

When she could not bear the hunger anymore, she decided to take her life, and she thought what better and convenient way than to eat a breadfruit from the tree growing in her garden.

There were many and she struck one of the breadfruits with a wooden pole to pick one.

She didn't know that breadfruit was a botanical berry which serves as both a vegetable and a fruit. Therefore, she was not aware that she can make a dessert like a pudding and instead she settled for cooking a curry with pieces of breadfruit thrown into the mix.

After consuming the curry, she laid down, hoping to sleep and never wake up. She did fall asleep but was surprised at waking up after some hours.

Her plans of committing suicide thwarted, she visited her next door neighbor and shared her perplexing story.

Seeing that she was in good health, her neighbor experimented, and when she also found no negative side effects, she decided to tell her friends. Soon the news rapidly spread throughout the whole island and everyone tried and found breadfruits healthy and tasty. As Maldives is a small country, it didn't take much time for the story to spread to all inhabited islands and breadfruit became a "multi-purpose" fruit whereby we can mix with rice, throw into curry, and eat as a fried or sweet snack.

"Banbu” is said to be the sound the old lady perceived as the first breadfruit ever to be cooked in Maldives boiled in her aluminum pot.