I later spotted the fruits shown below, which appeared to be a kissing cousin of Senjed, at Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights. Unfortunately, these are just dried jujubes, another fairly confusing fruit profiled last summer in another post.
Every so often I encounter an ostensibly edible object which makes no immediate sense, fits into no previous classificatory bracket, and provides few visual hints as to its identity. On truly rare occasions, eating said object only makes things worse. Enter Senjed, a small dried fruit which, despite its wrinkled external texture, gives way to a shockingly fluffy interior; the closest comparison I can make is to some kind of prank jellybean filled with old-fashioned couch stuffing. The package, whose label I made a point only to read after attempting to figure out what was going on first on my own, describes a “taste and texture somewhere between dates and candy floss.” This, to me, seems a bit charitable. The highly informative bag, obtained from the venerable Manhattan Spice Temple Kalustyan’s, also offers a few different names for the item (Lotus Fruit, Silver Berry, Russian Olive, Oleaster Fruit), which helps to confirm that it is indeed a fruit, not some oddball candy hiding out in inside of one’s skin. The last appellation is especially useful, since it points out another deception; linguistically, the “aster” suffix indicates a less-than-flattering resemblance to something more valuable (think of “poetaster” as a word for a sham poet), The valued object to which the fruit here is being compared is the noble olive, although this specific oleaster should not be confused with the wild olive, the true oleaster, from which our eminently edible olive was originally cultivated. To return to the Oleaster Fruit, its inferior title may not be entirely fair; the Persians, from whom the “Senjed” name derives, seem to like it just fine, enough so that it also designates three different places in Iran. There, the plant isn’t seen as a crummy substitute for an olive, but is known as “lotus fruit,” despite the fact that it’s not related to the lotus and produces, at least to my eye, a very different flower. Whatever the reasoning, this traditional connection marks out Senjed as a symbol of love in Persian culture, employed in the Nowruz vernal equinox celebration as part of the ceremonial table setting. The ideal method for digging into one of these is apparently to peel it first - exposing the downy innards, which can then be picked off the seed - a process which avoids the shock of biting into a fluffball concealed inside of a pruney casing.
I later spotted the fruits shown below, which appeared to be a kissing cousin of Senjed, at Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights. Unfortunately, these are just dried jujubes, another fairly confusing fruit profiled last summer in another post.
2 Comments
Ariya M Ahrary
10/7/2018 10:50:52 pm
Where to buy
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Alireza Atashkhiz
8/28/2020 04:09:12 am
Actually the picture shows Senjed ! It would be hard for someone unfamiliar with jujube and oleaster to tell the difference.
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