Well, it was actually a “kul” – as we called in Bengali. It is a kind of a ber and is called a jujube in English, I believe.

We grew up with multiple “kul” trees in our house. Come winter, one of the common activities for us kids were to get those “kul“s out of the trees. With help of sticks and sometimes stones. They tended to be fairly tarty in the beginning of the winter and became sweeter towards the end. Hence the rule of thumb was not to eat these before “Saraswati Pujo“.

Of course there were various varieties of these – the small, green, very tarty ones; the bigger, often light green, yellow, orange or even red sweeter ones. Then there was this variety called “biliti kul” (meaning “foreign jujube”) that were even bigger and tasted really great.

Often these bers were dried into dark red, shrunk versions that were used for making different kinds of “chutneys“!

After what I would guess to be four decades or so, had one such cool “kul” at my inlaws. These ones were humongous. Much bigger than the biggest “biliti kul” I had ever had. I have to admit, the taste did not match up. Or to at least what I remember of their taste.