Herbs and Spices used in Thai Cuisine, Bael fruit or Ma-tuum, Simply-thai.com-Thai-Market-Online

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Bael fruit - Ma-Tuum
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The bael fruit tree is slow-growing, of medium size, up to 40 or 50 ft (12-15 m) tall with short trunk, thick, soft, flaking bark, and spreading, sometimes spiny branches, the lower ones drooping. It is sweet at first taste and then irritating to the throat. The deciduous, alternate leaves, borne singly, are composed of 3 to 5 oval, pointed, shallowly toothed leaflets, and the terminal one with a long petiole. New foliage is glossy and pinkish-maroon. Mature leaves emit a disagreeable odor when bruised. Fragrant flowers, in clusters of 4 to 7 along the young branchless, have 4 recurved, fleshy petals, green outside, yellowish inside, and 50 or more greenish-yellow stamens. The fruit, round, pyriform, oval, or oblong, may have a thin, hard, woody shell or a more or less soft rind, grey-green until the fruit is fully ripe, when it turns yellowish. It is dotted with aromatic, minute oil glands. Inside, there is a hard central core and 8 to 20 faintly defined triangular segments, with thin, dark-orange walls, filled with aromatic, pale-orange, pasty, sweet, resinous, more or less astringent, pulp. Embedded in the pulp are 10 to 15 seeds, flattened-oblong, about 3/8 in (1 cm) long, bearing woolly hairs and each enclosed in a sac of adhesive, transparent mucilage that solidifies on drying.
Medicinal Uses : The fresh ripe pulp of the higher quality cultivars, and the "sherbet" made from it, are taken for their mild laxative, tonic and digestive effects. A decoction of the unripe fruit, with fennel and ginger, is prescribed in cases of haemorrhoids. It has been surmised that the psoralen in the pulp increases tolerance of sunlight and aids in the maintaining of normal skin colour. It is employed in the treatment of leucoderma. Marmelosin derived from the pulp is given as a laxative and diuretic. Cautious Uses : In large doses, it lowers the rate of respiration, depresses heart action and causes sleepiness.