Pickles, Sambols and Preserves
Wood Apple Jam (Divul Jam)
Divul pulp cooked down with jaggery, tangy and dense, and unlike any jam you have had.
- Made from real divul pulp, not flavouring
- Sweetened with palm jaggery rather than white sugar
- Tangy and dense, closer to a fruit butter than a jelly
- One of the few genuinely Sri Lankan preserves
- No pectin, no artificial colour
Available to pre-orderSKU: CC-JAM-WDA
Size: 250g
- Carefully packed and shipped to your door
- 14-day replacement on damaged items
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Description
Wood apple, divul in Sinhala, is a hard-shelled fruit with a brown, sticky, intensely tangy pulp. Cooked down with palm jaggery it makes a dark, dense jam that tastes sour and sweet and slightly fermented all at once. It is the most distinctly Sri Lankan preserve we make.
A wood apple looks like a small grey cannonball and has to be cracked open with something heavy. Inside is a brown pulp that smells sharply of the tropics and tastes like nothing else: sour, sweet, faintly musky.
Most Sri Lankans drink it, mashed with water, sugar and a pinch of salt. Cooking it into a jam with jaggery concentrates the whole thing, and the sourness turns into something closer to tamarind or a very ripe date.
This is not a jam for somebody who wants strawberry. It is dark, dense, tangy, and it will divide a breakfast table. That is rather the point of it.
How to Use
- On thick white bread with butter
- Stirred into yoghurt or curd
- Thinned with water into the traditional divul drink
- With a strong plain tea, no milk
Cook with It
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Frequently Asked
Sour, sweet and slightly musky all at once, with a note some people read as fermented. The nearest comparison is a very ripe date crossed with tamarind, though neither gets close. It is genuinely unlike anything grown outside the tropics.
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