Strange Fruits, Part 2: Palmyra Palm Seeds, Bissap, Persimmon

Here you go. The second delivery of the boys’ thoughts about fruits they tried along their walk. Some of them tastier, some of them with less flavor.

by FERENC IVANICS

Palmyra Palm Fruit (Seed)

When we still had some 60 miles to go to arrive to Dakar (Senegal) huge fan palms started to appear more and more frequently. Nice specimens of the African palmyra palms, a great sight on the dusk horizon, bringing pleasant and less pleasant thoughts into our minds: like Vietnam.


The fruits of these palms are like enormous berries, and they hang on the trees in large clusters. The palm tree and its fruits look definitely different than coconut palms but the fruit is edible. So we tried it.


They sell them along the road, on the spot. On the face of it, it looks like there’s loads of them, but it’s relative. If you imagine the fruits shrunk to the size of a currant then they would hardly fill a basket.


Anyways, we bought some and tried some. The fruit is usually eaten roasted, but the seeds are edible, too, when they are young and fresh. So we cut the fruit open and found three somethings inside. The texture of these somethings is somewhat like silicone. I would compare the touch of it to lychees, but only the touch, not the taste.



Not by a long shot. These jelly-like seeds contain a small amount of sweet fluid, which is quite tasty. The seed itself doesn’t really taste anything, but it’s not bad either. It won’t be our favorite fruit but we will remember trying it, for a while. So, it’s a half-this, half-that.

Bissap or Roselle

The next surprise awaited us in Senegal, too. Bissap, a national soft drink of the country.


You would think it’s a fruit juice, a mixture of raspberry-blackberry-blueberry-cranberry flavors, but it’s a tea. Or I should say an infusion. The plant is a cousin of hibiscus, it looks like a thin bush and it has many bright red, fleshy fruits that looked like flowers to us.



Eating them raw is not recommended, they are like lemon on steroids, extremely sour. They dry these red fruits, make an infusion, add some sugar and voilà, your bissap “juice” is ready. It had been completely unknown to us before, and yet, we found out that it can be grown in European continental climate as well. It’s really delicious; anyone can give it a try. So, note to self: do try this at home. :)

Persimmon

Our last guest today is persimmon, which has some variants around the world. This one we ran into in France is probably the Japanese persimmon or kaki, widely cultivated in Southern Europe. It’s best when it softens a bit after harvest. Did not become our favorite, either. Its texture is quite unique.