Went to a new patient the other day. Sweet lady, but a little bit foggy in the noggin. (If I had her med list, I’d be unconscious, so I can’t really fault her for that!). She gave me a fruit and insisted I eat it and it was made of awesome.
Yellow, almost round but a little ovoid. Roughly 3 inches in diameter. One end had a little light brown spot, like either the remnants of a blossom or perhaps it was where a stem attached, I’m not sure. No mark on the other end.
“I eat it with the skin?” I asked, and she said yes. The skin was a little leathery, but thin and easy to bite through. Inside were many small seeds, distributed throughout several divisions internally. There was no tough membrane doing the dividing, though, just here are seeds and there are seeds and there are seeds in visually distinct areas. Just under the skin was an (edible) area of thicker flesh with no seeds, looking for all the world like the pith just under the orange skin of an orange, but it was sweet and soft and had some juiciness to it. The fruit as a whole was gently sweet, with a little astringency and some tannins I could sense on the back of my front teeth, so maybe from the skin. I had no problem swallowing all the small seeds with the fruit, and she didn’t indicate I should be spitting them out or anything. When I was done, there was absolutely nothing left - no stems or seeds or core or pit, so it would make a great snack to bring in the car!
She told me it was “a java fruit”, but she hesitated before the said it. English, by the way, is not her first language, Arabic is. She did say that it was a kind of fruit they had “back home” in Jerusalem, but that this one came from the local supermarket and “they not hard to find here.”
She also said they’re “good for kidneys,” if that helps.
What were they? They weren’t purple, like these java plums (Sizygium cumini). They weren’t pyramid shaped and red like thesejava apples. Their skin didn’t have the citrus pores or astringency of a kumquat, and it was far larger than any kumquat I’ve ever seen, and didn’t have as segmented segments and the seeds were much smaller and more numerous. They looked similar to these java plums (Spondias Mombin), but those have a single pit in the center, not a bunch of small seeds.
Anyone?
