Strange Fruit
November 13th, 2006 by: cheyenneWe bought this at one of the grocery stores in Liberia. I liked the symmetry of it and the shape of the stem and the lovely golden orange color. It is weirdly lightweight for the size.
Sliced open, it revealed a centimeter of pithy shell with an interior that can only be described as snot. Well, that’s not entirely fair; chunky snot.
You see that? It smells generally fruity in an unidentifiable way. We got up the nerve to taste it.
Glop on spoon. The snot-like interior is made up of many dark seeds glommed together with a gelatinous connective tissue, which is disturbingly difficult to separate into a spoon-sized bite. It reminds me of frog eggs, until you take a bite—not that I’ve tried a bite of frog eggs before.
And the taste is not unpleasant, sort of jasminey but with a little orange; neither flavor is particularly strong. The texture is something else: extraordinarily slimy and gooey but then the seed part is crunchy—exceedingly crunchy, like little dried beetles.
I’ve never tasted anything like it.
November 13th, 2006 at 11:23 am
So—what is it??? You guys have more culinary moxie than I do. You must find out the name of this “strange fruit.”(which, by the way, is a sorrowful blues song about the hanging of black men in the South back in the 40’s and 50’s….but maybe you knew that) Love, Mom/Peg
November 13th, 2006 at 11:53 am
I forgot to keep the grocery receipt with the name (doh!), so I don’t even know. Actually, I have not heard of the song ‘Strange Fruit,’ I just thought this fruit was strange, as a fruit.
November 14th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Greetings from Hong Kong. We had ‘strange fruit’ on our itunes. Billie Holiday does a version. You’ve heard it, I know. That looks like some kind of weird overripe guava. I got into an elevator that reeked of durian the other day, speaking of weird tropical fruits. They’re probably out of season by now but if you can get your hands on any of those awesome lychees they have in Costa Rica with the bright red pokey shells, eat some for me (yum).
November 14th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
You can probably get those in Hong Kong because they’re native to asia. We haven’t seen them in Costa Rica (maybe out of season) but earlier in the summer we had many in El Salvador. We call them Rambutans, but in El Salvador they called them “Mamón Chino” because they are similar to the local Mamón. In spanish Mamón is a grafic word that means sucking on a breast, I guess because you must suck the fruit off the seed.
November 25th, 2006 at 9:50 am
i forget the name but this fruit is common in viet nam. they were more redish there but we ate them a lot.
mom cher
May 1st, 2007 at 8:26 pm
it is a hawaiian fruit called lilikoi
May 9th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Isn’t it a passion fruit?
May 9th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I looked up Passion fruit on wikipedia and it does seem to in fact be a passion fruit of some kind. This was sold as Granadilla. We are somewhat remiss in following up on this post. We have since seen Granadilla and Maracujá side by side in a produce display. They were very similar but of different colors and flavor. There’s no telling though, after all latin americans seem to be unaware of the lemon. I guess there are many regional names for passion fruit and numberous species with slightly different characteristics which lends to the confusion. Also, I admit that before this neither of us had knowingly eaten (or seen) a fresh passion fruit even though we have marvelled at the flowers on many occasions. It turns out that I like the flavor but would rather have it in juice. Desnotted, so to speak.