I can say, from a little research, that none of these are related to the Indian Plum, also known as the osoberry, which in furtherance of all this confusion hails not from India but the Pacific coast of the North American continent. Pushing the botanical chaos even further, the ‘Indian Jujube’ does sometimes appear in plum guise, specifically in the wrinkled, preserved form of Xi Muoi, Vietnamese sour plums, which show up as both a Warhead-style sucker (taking the sucker-er through extreme stages of sweet, sour and salty, similar to those strange Chinese olives), and the basis for a refreshing tonic drink. I bought the plums pictured above in Denver over a year ago, and still haven’t figured out an adequate culinary use for them, beyond plunking one or two into a pitcher of lemonade or passing them off as candy to unsuspecting guests. The Indian Jujube, again appearing in its miniature, not-as-appley form, continues on the road toward utter mystification by appearing as one of the principal ingredients in this Chinese drink, a veritable party of exotic botanicals that falls within the inscrutable dessert category of ‘sweet soups.”
A jujube is both a candy - the American equivalent to German gummies and Turkish lokum - and a fruit, a red date which has a large variety of medicinal and culinary uses, mostly in Southeast Asian cultures. Part of the buckthorn family, it’s also closely related to Ziziphus mauritiana, the tree which produces the slightly stockier fruit known as the Bere (or the Ber, the Chinee Apple, Indian plum or Masau). Most popularly, it’s referred to as an ‘Indian Jujube,’ although the decidedly Indian Patel Brothers grocery at which I purchased this apple-like fruit also used ‘bere’ on its display. It’s hard enough to separate one cultivar from another when dealing with familiar fruits; this becomes downright impossible when you range out into foreign exotics, so I’ll leave it up to someone else to taxonomically classify all these different variants. The one I ate looked something like this, although with the green skin cast of a Granny Smith apple, with flesh that was similar but a bit softer in texture.
I can say, from a little research, that none of these are related to the Indian Plum, also known as the osoberry, which in furtherance of all this confusion hails not from India but the Pacific coast of the North American continent. Pushing the botanical chaos even further, the ‘Indian Jujube’ does sometimes appear in plum guise, specifically in the wrinkled, preserved form of Xi Muoi, Vietnamese sour plums, which show up as both a Warhead-style sucker (taking the sucker-er through extreme stages of sweet, sour and salty, similar to those strange Chinese olives), and the basis for a refreshing tonic drink. I bought the plums pictured above in Denver over a year ago, and still haven’t figured out an adequate culinary use for them, beyond plunking one or two into a pitcher of lemonade or passing them off as candy to unsuspecting guests. The Indian Jujube, again appearing in its miniature, not-as-appley form, continues on the road toward utter mystification by appearing as one of the principal ingredients in this Chinese drink, a veritable party of exotic botanicals that falls within the inscrutable dessert category of ‘sweet soups.”
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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