Artocarpus heterophyllus Lam., the jackfruit; with its Malesian relative Artocarpus integer (Thunb.) Merr., the cempedak
The jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, bears amongst the largest fruits of any tree: a syncarp of hundreds of fused flowers that may weigh twenty or thirty kilograms and has been recorded at fifty, green and studded with blunt points when young and yellowing as it ripens. It is far too heavy for the twigs, and grows instead from the trunk and the main limbs, and on old trees from the roots. Inside a thick rind and a mass of fibrous rags lie the bulbs, the fleshy perianths that are the part people eat, each wrapped round a seed the size of a chestnut, and the whole tree runs with a white latex so sticky that it was once boiled into birdlime and still has to be kept off the knife and the hands with oil. It is eaten at every stage of its life: young, when the whole fruit is cooked as a vegetable; mature but unripe, when it is a starch; ripe, when the bulbs are intensely sweet and scented; and for its seeds, which are boiled or roasted.
Its home is the rainforest of the Western Ghats, the mountain chain along the western edge of the Indian peninsula. E. Soepadmo, writing in the standard flora of the edible plants of Southeast Asia in 1991, called it 'most probably indigenous to and in the past grew wild in the rain forests of the Western Ghats', and Alphonse de Candolle had placed it there in the nineteenth century. When people began to plant it is not known. Remains attributed to the genus Artocarpus have been reported from sites of the late second millennium BCE in the middle Ganges valley, at Narhan and Senuwar, but they do not certainly separate the jackfruit from the monkey jack, a native relative of northern India, and no date is rested on them here. The earliest secure evidence is poetry. The Tamil anthologies of the Sangam, most of their poems composed, in Kamil Zvelebil's judgement, between the first century BCE and the second century CE, know the jackfruit, palā, as a tree of the hill country that bears its fruit on its roots, and the origin of this journey is dated from them.
Wherever the jackfruit grows, its cooks divide it the same way, into a firm fruit and a soft one, and they have done so for as long as anyone has written about it. The Dominican Jordanus, made bishop of Quilon in 1329, described a tree bearing the chaqui and another bearing a fruit 'quite as big and as sweet', which Yule and Burnell read as the Malayalam varikka, the superior fruit; Ibn Battuta found the barkī 'sweeter and better-flavoured' than the shakī; and Robert Knox, a captive in Ceylon, wrote in 1681 that 'the Warracha is hard, but the Vellas as soft as pap'. The division runs through every jackfruit country today: varikka and koozha in Kerala, waraka and wela in Sri Lanka, kaapo and rassal in Goa, khaja and gala in Bangladesh, nangka salak and nangka bubur in Malaysia and Java, and jaca-dura and jaca-mole in Brazil, where a jaca-manteiga sits between them as the dorosa does in Bangladesh. These are forms of one species with one homeland, so they share one origin point, and each recipe says which it wants: the firm fruit holds its shape in chips, preserves, and syrup, and the soft one, which falls apart, goes into batters and cakes.
The cempedak, Artocarpus integer, is filed in this entry, as the breadnut is filed under breadfruit, because cooks treat it as the jackfruit's twin although it is a different species. It is native to Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra, where it has its own wild form and its own domestication, and it has an origin point of its own. The breadfruit, A. altilis, is a cousin in the same genus with an entry of its own; Kerala, which knew the jackfruit first, calls it sheemachakka, the foreign jackfruit.
The jackfruit spread across India before anyone recorded where it went. The Sanskrit panasa, the Marathi phanas, and the Hindi and Bengali kathal mark its roads north, and when the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang travelled through eastern India around 640 he found it 'plentiful' and yet 'highly esteemed' in Pundravardhana, in northern Bengal, and cultivated with the coconut in Kamarupa, in Assam. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, met it in Hindustan in the 1520s and did not care for it: it looked, he wrote, 'like a sheep's stomach stuffed and made into a haggis', and 'you would say that the tree was all hung round with haggises!'
It crossed the Bay of Bengal with the trade of the first millennium. The Chinese first knew it by its Sanskrit name, as po-na-so, which the Book of Sui, completed in 636, records amongst the trees of Chenla, in Cambodia; later they called it po-lo-mi, a name that tradition said was given when a man from a country called Po-lo brought the tree to Canton in the sixth century. The jackfruit is carved amongst the trees of Borobudur, in central Java, around 800; Chau Ju-kua, the Song inspector of foreign trade in Fujian, wrote in 1225 that the po-lo-mi came from central Java and grew at the temple of the South Sea god at Canton; Ma Huan, who sailed with the Ming fleets of Zheng He between 1413 and 1433, found it in Champa, Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, and Bengal; Antonio Pigafetta, with Magellan in 1521, found it at Cebu and at Brunei; and the French visitors of the 1680s described it at Ayutthaya, in Siam. Most botanists take it to have travelled east from India in this way, and the paths on this map follow them. Roger Blench has argued otherwise: the Malay nangka, the Thai khanun, and the Vietnamese mít owe nothing to Sanskrit, and he reads the names as pointing to a second centre of cultivation in Southeast Asia, probably in the Malay Peninsula.
Europe met it on the Malabar coast and took its name there: the Portuguese made the Malayalam chakka into jaca, and English cut jaca down to 'jack'. From Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, the tree went west. In 1677 the prince regent Pedro, hoping to take the spice trade from the Dutch, asked the governor of Goa for seeds of cloves, cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg to plant in Brazil, and, as Warren Dean records, the Jesuits in Brazil received seeds of the jackfruit and the mango with them. The spices failed. The jackfruit spread along the whole Atlantic coast of Brazil, and on the Tijuca massif above Rio de Janeiro it has run wild through the forest. The French had it on Réunion by the late eighteenth century. In the Caribbean and East Africa it is grown and eaten as a fruit, but the atlas found no cooking there built upon it.
India grows the most jackfruit, followed by Bangladesh, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all four it is both a fruit and a vegetable. It is the national fruit of Bangladesh and the state fruit of Kerala and of Tamil Nadu. Kerala's declaration, made in March 2018, was meant to launch a 'Kerala Jackfruit' brand, for the state grows some three hundred million fruits a year and lets perhaps a third of them rot where they fall. In the Kerala of living memory the jackfruit was the food that carried the labouring poor through the monsoon, when work was scarce.
Sri Lanka calls the tree bath gasa, the rice tree. In 1918 the temperance campaigner and nationalist Arthur V. Dias, who had been sentenced to death by court martial after the riots of 1915 and reprieved, began a campaign to plant it across the island, distributing seeds and seedlings free, some of them brought from Johore, on the argument that the jack was good for food and for wood. He is remembered as Kos Mama, Uncle Jack; the post office issued a stamp in his honour in 1986; and the trees his campaign planted are widely credited in Sri Lanka with carrying households through the rice shortages of the Second World War and of the 1970s.
The young fruit has lately become a meat for people who do not eat meat. Tinned in brine and shredded, it is sold across Europe and North America as pulled jackfruit, and favela cooperatives in Rio de Janeiro cook it as carne de jaca. The idea is not new: Bengali cooks have long called the young fruit gachh-pantha, the goat that grows on a tree. In Brazil the tree's vigour has made it one of the most troublesome invaders of the Atlantic Forest.
Historical Journey of Jackfruit
Kerala & the Western Ghats — by the 2nd century CE
The rainforests of the Western Ghats are where botanists place the jackfruit's wild home, and Kerala, below them, eats it at every stage of its life. The tender young fruit, idichakka, is boiled, pounded in a mortar, and tossed with coconut as a thoran. The full-grown but unripe fruit is boiled and crushed with coconut as chakka puzhukku, the food that carried the labouring poor through the monsoon, simmered into chakka erissery for the feast, and sliced and fried in coconut oil into chakka varuthathu, the chips of every snack tin. The ripe bulbs are cooked down with jaggery and ghee into chakka varatti, the jackfruit halwa that keeps for months and becomes chakka pradhaman, or worked into rice flour and steamed in cones of wild cinnamon leaf as kumbilappam. The seeds, chakkakuru, are roasted in coconut oil or curried with green mango. Kerala made the jackfruit its state fruit in March 2018.
The earliest writing about it is Tamil poetry. The Sangam anthologies were composed, in Kamil Zvelebil's judgement, between the first century BCE and the second century CE, in a Tamil country that then took in the Chera kingdom of Kerala, and in the eighteenth poem of the Kuruntokai the poet Kapilar addresses a man of the slopes where the jackfruit, fenced with bamboo, bears its fruit on its roots. Of the girl who loves him he says that, like a great fruit hanging from a small stalk, her life is very small and her love immense. The poem needs no footnote for the jackfruit; everyone who heard it knew the sight.
The next witnesses are foreigners. The Dominican Jordanus, made bishop of Quilon in 1329, described the chaqui and a second tree bearing a fruit 'quite as big and as sweet', which Yule and Burnell read as varikka, the superior fruit: the firm-fleshed jackfruit that Kerala still sets above the soft koozha. John of Marignolli, the papal legate, found one 'as big as a great lamb, or a child of three years old' in the 1340s. In 1682 Hendrik van Rheede, who had governed Dutch Malabar, published the tree as Tsjaka-Maram in the Hortus Malabaricus, compiled with the help of the Ezhava physician Itty Achudan, and from the same Malayalam chakka the Portuguese had already made jaca, and English 'jack'.
Pundravardhana & Bengal — c. 640 CE
The jackfruit reached Bengal early enough that nobody recorded its arrival. When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang came to the kingdom of Pundravardhana, in northern Bengal, around 640, he found the panasa 'plentiful' and yet 'highly esteemed', and described it with a traveller's care: as large as a pumpkin, yellowish red when ripe, holding many tens of little fruits the size of a pigeon's egg, and growing sometimes on the branches and sometimes at the roots. Alexander Cunningham identified the capital of Pundravardhana with Mahasthangarh, near Bogra, where this point stands, and when Ma Huan came to Bengal with the Ming fleets eight centuries after Xuanzang, the jackfruit headed his list of its fruits.
It is now the national fruit of Bangladesh, kathal or kanthal, and Bangladeshi growers divide it three ways: the firm khaja, the soft and juicy gala, and the dorosa between them. Bengali cooks on both sides of the modern border call the young fruit echor and cook it as if it were meat, with ginger, cumin, and garam masala, which has earned it the name gachh-pantha, the goat that grows on a tree; it is said to have been the nearest thing to mutton allowed to the Hindu widows of Bengal, who were forbidden meat. The seeds are boiled and mashed with raw mustard oil, green chilli, and onion into a bhorta.
Yogyakarta & Central Java — c. 800 CE
Java carved the jackfruit before anyone there wrote it down. Borobudur, built around 800 some forty kilometres from Yogyakarta, has 160 relief panels round its buried foot, the Karmawibhangga, and when Fauziah and her colleagues (2026) identified the plants on them, the jackfruit was amongst the five most frequent, with the mango, the Alexandrian laurel, the tropical almond, and the water apple. Four centuries later Chau Ju-kua, the Song inspector of foreign trade in Fujian, recorded that the po-lo-mi, 'of the size of a pumpkin', its skin 'covered with nodules like the hair on a Buddha's head', and its pulp 'of extreme sweetness', came from central Java. How it reached the island is not recorded; the path on this map follows the majority view that it came from India with the trade of the first millennium.
Central Java cooks the young fruit, gori, more patiently than anywhere else. Gudeg, the dish Yogyakarta is known by, is young jackfruit simmered for hours with palm sugar, coconut milk, and teak leaves, which turn it a deep reddish brown; the name is usually derived from hangudeg, cooking jackfruit in coconut milk in a great cauldron. The Serat Centhini, the encyclopaedic Javanese poem composed at Surakarta between 1814 and 1823, has its travellers served gudeg at a house in Klaten, and Pakubuwana IX, king of Surakarta from 1861 to 1893, is recorded buying it with nasi liwet at Baki. A popular story sets the first gudeg in the clearing of the Mentaok forest for the Mataram capital at Kotagede; it is told without documentary support. Yogyakarta's gudeg village at Barek grew up after 1949, when Gadjah Mada University moved to Bulaksumur and the villagers, who had jackfruit trees in their own yards, found themselves with students to feed and their raw material, as Bara Yudhistira puts it, 'without capital'. Cooks take the soft nangka bubur for wet gudeg, eaten the day it is made, and the firm nangka salak for dry gudeg, fried down to keep.
Champa & Central Vietnam — 1413–1433 CE
Ma Huan, the Muslim interpreter who sailed with the Ming admiral Zheng He, began his account of the countries of the Western Ocean with Champa, the Cham kingdom of what is now central Vietnam, whose capital then stood at Vijaya, where this point is placed. Amongst its fruits he set down the jackfruit: it resembled a winter melon, its skin was like a lychee's, and inside were lumps of yellow flesh as big as a hen's egg that tasted of honey, each holding a seed like a chicken's kidney which, roasted, tasted like a chestnut. His first voyage was that of 1413. The Chinese had recorded the tree in neighbouring Cambodia, under its Sanskrit name, in the seventh century, and the path on this map brings it from India with the same trade.
The Vietnamese took Vijaya in 1471 and the rest of Champa over the centuries that followed, and central Vietnam, where the Cham kingdom stood, cooks the young fruit, mít non, as gỏi mít: boiled, shredded, and tossed with pork, shrimp, and herbs, scattered with peanuts and fried shallots, and scooped up with sesame rice crackers. Vietnamese calls the fruit mít, a word that Roger Blench connects with the Lao mi and takes to be the source of the last syllable of the Chinese po-lo-mi.
Colombo & Sri Lanka — 1413–1433 CE
Sri Lanka calls the jackfruit tree bath gasa, the rice tree, and means it. Ma Huan listed the jackfruit amongst the fruits of Ceylon in his account of Zheng He's voyages, the earliest record of it on the island found for this entry, but the description that matters is Robert Knox's. Knox, an English sailor held captive in the kingdom of Kandy from 1660 to 1679, recorded that the people called the young fruit polos, the full-grown fruit cose, and the ripe fruit warracha or vellas, 'the Warracha is hard, but the Vellas as soft as pap'. The jacks were 'a great part of their Food': cut and boiled 'to save Rice and fill their Bellies', one fruit feeding six or seven men, whilst the poor roasted the seeds in the embers and carried them in a bag on a journey. The king's officers, he added, could take the fruit from any man's garden to feed the royal elephants.
The same stages name the dishes now: polos curry of the young fruit, kiri kos of the mature fruit in coconut milk, and the seeds, kos ata. In 1918 Arthur V. Dias began a campaign to plant jackfruit across the island, handing out seeds and seedlings free; he is remembered as Kos Mama, Uncle Jack, and the trees his campaign planted are widely credited in Sri Lanka with carrying households through the rice shortages of the Second World War and of the 1970s.
Malacca & the Malay Peninsula — 1413–1433 CE
Malacca was founded around 1400 and soon became the great port of the straits, and when Ma Huan came there with the Ming fleets of Zheng He he listed the jackfruit amongst its fruits, with sugarcane, bananas, and wild lychees: the earliest record of the tree on the Malay Peninsula found for this entry. The Malay name, nangka, owes nothing to Sanskrit, and Roger Blench reads it, with the Thai name borrowed from it, as a sign of a Southeast Asian centre of cultivation, perhaps on this peninsula. The paths on this map follow the majority view that the tree came from India with the trade across the Bay of Bengal, and they carry it on from Malacca to Siam and to the islands, the roads its Malay name travelled.
Malaysia divides the fruit as every jackfruit country does, into the soft nangka bubur and the firm nangka salak, and eats the ripe bulbs fresh. The young fruit, nangka muda, is a vegetable, and in Negeri Sembilan, the state north of Malacca whose Malays descend from Minangkabau settlers from Sumatra, and in the north of Malacca itself, it goes into the dish the state is known by, masak lemak cili api: a gravy of coconut milk turned yellowish green with fresh turmeric and made fierce with pounded bird's eye chillies. Across the peninsula it is simmered with beef in a spiced coconut gravy as gulai nangka muda, which, a Malaysian recipe writer recalled, no wedding feast of the old days could be without. The cempedak, the jackfruit's cousin, has its own origin point in Borneo.
Cebu & the Visayas — 1521 CE
When Magellan's fleet reached Cebu in April 1521, Antonio Pigafetta listed the nangca amongst the produce of the island, with rice, ginger, bananas, oranges, lemons, sugarcane, coconuts, and gourds. He found it again at Brunei, and described it further on: knotty outside, with a marrowy seed that 'has a delicate taste like chestnuts'. The Visayan nangka and the Tagalog langka are the Malay word, and the tree came to the islands with the trade of the Malay and Javanese seas to the south-west, which are the two roads the paths on this map follow, from Malacca and from Java.
The Philippines cooks the young fruit as a vegetable, above all in coconut milk as ginataang langka, and puts the ripe bulbs into desserts and into the banana spring roll, turon. In Iloilo and the Western Visayas the unripe fruit is the third ingredient of KBL, kadyos, baboy, kag langka, pigeon peas, pork, and jackfruit soured with batwan, the dish Ilonggos living away from home miss most.
Goa & Portuguese India — 1547 CE
The Portuguese took Goa in 1510 and found the jackfruit already growing there, as it does along the whole length of the Western Ghats. In Konkani it is ponos, and Goans, like every other jackfruit people, divide it into the firm kaapo and the soft rassal. The Portuguese called it by the Malayalam name they had learnt on the Malabar coast, and in 1547 a grant of land at Calangute, north of Panaji, made over a palm grove and ground for planting 'mango trees and jack trees', mangueiras e jaqueiras. Garcia de Orta, the physician whose dialogues on the simples and drugs of India were printed at Goa in 1563, set down the names as he heard them: 'in Malavar jacas, in Canarese and Guzerati panas'.
Goa was the capital of Portuguese India and the Indian end of the India route, and it was from Goa that the jackfruit went to Brazil. Goan cooks bake the ripe rassal, whose honeyed pulp they prize for it, with semolina, coconut, and jaggery into pansache dhonas, traditionally in an earthen pot over a wood fire with burning coconut husks on the lid.
Salvador & Bahia, Brazil — after 1677 CE
The Portuguese carried the jackfruit to Brazil as one strand of a larger plan. In 1677, hoping to break the Dutch hold on the spice trade, the prince regent Pedro asked the governor of Goa for seeds of cloves, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, and ginger for planting in Brazil, and the India fleets, allowed to call at Salvador since 1671, carried them. The Jesuits in Brazil, Warren Dean records from José Roberto do Amaral Lapa's history of Bahia and the India route, received seeds of the jackfruit and the mango with them. The cloves never came, and the other spices hardly took; the jackfruit took to the coast so thoroughly that it became a food of the enslaved and the poor, and on the Tijuca massif above Rio de Janeiro, where it was planted round the estates and again in the reforestation that Major Manuel Gomes Archer began with enslaved labourers in 1862, it has run wild through the Atlantic Forest.
Brazil divides the fruit three ways: the firm jaca-dura, the soft and sweet jaca-mole, and the jaca-manteiga between them. The firm fruit is cooked in syrup with cloves as doce de jaca, a sweet of the Bahian and Northeastern table, and in the present century the green fruit has become carne de jaca, the vegetable meat of Brazilian vegan cooking, made into moquecas, coxinhas, and stroganoffs by cooperatives in the favelas of Rio.
Chiang Mai & Lanna — by 1688 CE
The first Europeans to describe the jackfruit in Siam were the French of the 1680s. Nicolas Gervaise, a missionary who had lived in the kingdom, called the jack tree 'un bel arbre fort haut', a fine and very tall tree, in the natural history of Siam he published in 1688, with fruit the size and shape of a pumpkin and a skin like a durian's. Simon de La Loubère, Louis XIV's envoy in 1687 and 1688, described the fruit as shaped like a large, badly rounded melon, with a grey skin worked like shagreen, gave its Siamese name, and had the tree engraved for his account of 1691. Both wrote from Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital to the south; the date of this point is theirs, and the tree is surely older in the Thai kingdoms than any European record of it. The Thai name, khanun, is by Roger Blench's reading the Malay nangka turned about, which points to the road north from the Malay Peninsula that the path on this map follows.
The name is also a pun. Nun means to support, and the jackfruit is a tree of good omen. In the north, the old kingdom of Lanna, the young fruit is cooked as kaeng khanun, a curry of pork ribs, tomatoes, and cha-om or wild betel leaves in a paste of dried chilli, garlic, shallot, and shrimp paste, and it is cooked at the traditional new year and for weddings for the luck of its name. The same young fruit is boiled, pounded in a mortar, and stir-fried with minced pork and chilli paste as tam khanun, which the north also calls tam banun. Thailand is now the third largest grower of jackfruit.
Borneo & the Malay Peninsula — before 1776 CE
This is the cempedak's origin, and the cempedak, Artocarpus integer, is the jackfruit's nearest relative and a different species, native to the forests of Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra. Its wild form, which Malaysians call bangkong, grows in the Peninsula, and in Borneo the cultivated cempedak itself grows wild. The genetic study of Maria Wang, Nyree Zerega, and their colleagues (2018) found the cempedaks of Borneo and of the Peninsula to be distinct groups and could not establish in which direction the tree was domesticated, so the atlas places this point in Borneo, where the cempedak grows truly wild, and names the Peninsula with it. The date is that of the earliest scientific description found for this entry, Thunberg's Radermachia integra of 1776; the tree was in cultivation long before, but no earlier record was found.
The fruit is smaller than the jackfruit and was prized above it. William Marsden, in the 1811 edition of his History of Sumatra, called the nangka 'the more common, less esteemed, and larger fruit', and wrote of both that the flesh was 'of a rich, and to strangers too strong smell and flavour, but which gains upon the palate'. Malaysians press the soft bulbs together, dip them in batter, and fry them as cempedak goreng, and the Banjar of South Kalimantan salt and ferment the thick inner rind into mandai, which keeps for months and is fried as a savoury. Where the two trees grow together they cross, and Malaysian growers have cloned the hybrid, the nangka-cempedak.
Saint-Denis & Réunion — 1780 CE
Réunion, which the French called Bourbon until the Revolution, has made the young jackfruit one of the vegetables of its Creole kitchen. Ti jak, the little jackfruit, is picked long before it ripens, peeled with oiled hands, and cooked as cari ti jak, braised with onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and tomato round smoked pork, boucané, until the fruit softens and takes up the smoke. The trees grow in great numbers in the humid lowland forests of the island's south-east.
How the jackfruit arrived is not recorded in anything consulted for this entry, but every account points to India. A list of introduction dates compiled from Cirad's Grand livre des fruits tropicaux gives 1780, when Bourbon was a port of call for the ships of the French Company of the Indies, which called at the island in both directions on the voyages between France and its Indian posts: Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast, French from 1674, and Mahé on the Malabar coast, a French trading post from 1721 in the heart of the jackfruit's own country. Other accounts credit the indentured labourers who came from India after 1848. The path on this map is drawn from the Malabar coast on that evidence; the ship, the year, and the planter are not recorded.
