Yesterday I saw a small box in the corner that my mom had sent for Christmas: Cactus Candy!
As I removed the cellophane, I remembered the occasional cactus candy treat my brother and I would eat when I was a child.
It tasted exactly as I remembered, which is to say, pretty good, but nothing spectacular. In fact, this blog entry sort of sums it up.
But it’s Cactus candy (and it really is made from prickly pear cactus), and that’s what always made it cool .
'Cos you could slip one of these Cactus Candy squares in a lineup with a bag of Chuckles and nobody would know which one didn’t belong, even after tasting.
I’ve had it when I was a kid, but my flavor memory is a little dusty. I seem to recall it tastes and has a texture similar to dried papaya, but with that teethe-clenching-almost-too-sugary-to-keep-in-your-mouth thing.
One can buy cactus fruit, tunas, in Latin markets around here. It has no taste save for a faint sweetness. But it has a brilliant and gorgeous purple/magenta color.
When I was younger, we made jelly out of wild cactus fruit once. It was okay, but not all that great; we’d picked the bland green kind, not the purple kind.
As a kid my family lived Phoenix AZ for about 5 years, and my Dad would harvest prickley pears from neighbors decorative prickley pear plant (with their permission of course). IIRC he’d soak them in a bucket to assist removal of the thorns.
I did that once - in Cyprus, I happened across a prickly pear by the roadside with enormous fist-sized fruits on it, red as a pillar box, soft and ripe.
I managed to pick them without injury and back at the hotel room, I ate them with a knife and fork, but still managed to get one of the small, hairlike spines in my lip - almost impossible to see or remove, but exquisitely irritating and painful.
The fruit was delicious - tasting sort of melon-pear-banana - very sweet and juicy, with a pocket of hard, edible seeds in the middle.
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