What's My Fruit? - Episode 5

[davidn]

I still haven't quite got over how much more accessible absolutely everywhere seems when you have your own car. I started this little series of entries because actually being able to get to the import supermarket was a special occasion that deserved some recognition, but now we're free to go there whenever we like. But even though our visits are more frequent now, its supply of fruit from other dimensions in space and time has not been exhausted, and this was what I decided to bring back with us last week.

This is the fruit from a Pouteria sapota, Mamey sapote, Abricó, or - as it was labelled in the shop - a Mamey. Its appearance is a bit like a coconut and a bit like a melon - its skin isn't quite hairy, but has a soft fuzz all over it, giving it an uncomfortable warmth that makes it feel like holding a small living creature.

This one isn't nearly as dangerous as some of the other things I've brought back - you can get into it by just piercing and sawing it in half, though the skin can take some punishment. On the inside, it's suddenly an avocado - though an avocado coloured a sort of radioactive orange - and once you've got the single, uncannily shiny seed out of the middle, you can then just spoon out the rest and eat it raw, so it's also one of the least inconvenient fruits I've picked up.

The texture is almost exactly the same as an avocado, but it's slightly wetter and juicier. And its taste is... something I can't really adequately describe, though there are a couple of attempts on that Wikipedia page above. If you dispel any citrus notions you have and forget how the fruit called 'orange' actually tastes, it's a bit like what the colour orange would taste like - I'm not really sure that I can do any better than that. We just tried enough of it to taste, and it has to be said that neither of us really liked it very much, though it wasn't exactly bad - and I still consider this choice an extremely successful one, for having discovered a new fruit that can't accurately be described as just a combination of several previously known ones.

This thing was also living inside, and escaped in a panic when I first halved the fruit - I put it outside. It isn't as leviathan-like as comparing the photos might make it seem - they're not to the same scale and it was less than half an inch long. I can only hope it wasn't one of those foreign species of insects that the customs office are always so worried about, which will upset the balance of the ecosystem in our back garden and cause everything to wither and die within the next few months.

Comments

[eternalsailordianamon (from livejournal.com)]

Aw, it's a little black silverfish.