The ice apple is more than just a seasonal delicacy

Come the summer months, April through August, and the fruit market across India is replete with the fruit ice apple, called ‘nungu’ in Tamil, ‘munjulu’ in Telugu, ‘tadgola’ in Hindi, and ‘taal’ in Bengali. It is largely found in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and in West Bengal.

Once you peel its outer skin, you find an ice-like fruit (see image) that tastes delicious. The tree is a member of the palm trees, commonly called palmyra. It is a tropical tree, and fruit, found in India, Bangladesh, and parts of Southeast Asia. It is the State tree of Tamil Nadu. Botanists say it is a member of the Arecaceae family and its name is Borassus flabellifer.

Ancient physicians in these regions used materials from the plant for medicinal purposes. Ancient Tamil literature describes it as a favoured plant with a sweet juice. The locals made jaggery and an alcohol-rich toddy from the plant. Ayurveda practitioners extracted the liquid from the tree’s branches and body parts for use in a health-promoting drink called neera. The palm tree’s leaves were also used as a writing instrument. Even today, the tree’s branches are used to make mats, baskets, umbrellas, purses, and other handicraft materials in rural India.

Research on the plant biology of palmyra is actively going on in some parts of India, with support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The Palmyra Research Station in Kasargod, Kerala, is studying how neera from the plant can be tapped better and the biological aspects of the tree. Researchers at the Palmyrah Research Station at Killikulam in Thoothukudi district in Tamil Nadu are involved in genetic analyses of the plant for better yield, and are also studying the optimal way to make jaggery from the fruit. In Assam, we have tropical rainforests, deciduous forests, and grasslands in the Brahmaputra Valley, and in some of these ecosystems, palmyra trees and their products are being studied to understand their properties and other uses.

Palmyra trees and their fruits are also found in South and West Africa. A paper by Abe-Inge et al. from the Kwame Nkrumah University in Ghana, published in American Journal of Food and Nutrition in 2018 (DOI: 10.12691/ajf-6-5-2), discusses the palmyra palm and its fruits and shows that it is high in phenols and alkali ions with free radical scavenging properties.   

Interestingly, the palmyra tree and ‘nungu’ are also favourites of the people in our island neighbour Sri Lanka as well. Interested readers might want to read an article in Food Chemistry Advances, where a group of researchers from Jaffna have explored the nutritional, health, and economic potential of the palmyra fruit (vol. 6, March 2025, 100880). They have also given a variety of dishes using the outer layer of the tree, and sweets using the fruit.

While the above-mentioned papers from Ghana and Sri Lanka highlight some of the health benefits of ice apple, such as its antioxidant and anti-diabetic effects, some popular nutritionists in India as well as have discussed many of the fruit’s nutritional benefits. In the same vein, it would be worthwhile for the Palmyra Research Stations to assess the benefits, develop more varieties of the tree and the fruit, identify the molecules which offer the benefit, and even synthesise them.

dbala@lvpei.org