All Fruits Great and Small

There’s fruit and veg here that you will never see in any supermarket or even on a South London market stall. Here are some examples of some wonderful and strange things we have have eaten:

Soursap: Twice the size of your head, green and scaly like a lizard and shaped like a bull’s heart, the fruit inside is white and milky with lots of black seeds inside. Chewing on the fruit leaves you with a mouthful of fibre. Best strained and made into a drink.

Plumroses: Pale yellow and round, the size of a shallot, with a green “navel”on the top. Eaten whole, they have crisp firm flesh. They smell like roses and taste of Turkish delight.

Whitey’s: Green/yellow pods – like a hard shiny broad bean. Inside: white fluffy seed pods a bit like fruit pastilles. The fluffy stuff tastes like sherbert and there is a black seed inside.

Cashews: They grow on trees! The bright red fruit is the size of a very small pear. Hanging of f the bottom is one cashew nut. The fruit bites a bit like an apple but the flesh inside is pale white and sharp flavoured.

Bananas: Of course. There are many variants of the small, very tasty Caribbean variety. Occasionally you can get “bush bananas” which progress from pinky brown to a very pretty rosy pink when ripe, and are slightly firmer than their yellow cousins.

Avocado Pear: or “pears” as they are called here. We have a big tree in our yard. The season is just starting and they say you can find them the size of a football.

Bora Beans: String beans gone mad. Up to 2 foot long, you can buy a bunch that looks like a handful of green snakes for 25p.

Passion Fruit: Here they are bright yellow and as big as your fist, but too sour to eat. Mix the flesh with water and the ubiquitous Demerara sugar (this is where it comes from) for a delicious fruit juice.

Bread Fruit or “Pap fruit”: A big green knobbly globe containing a nut and a sort of artichoke-like surround. Makes a great curry and the nut is good too – but it makes you “pap” (Guyanese for fart).