Exotic Flavors of the Orient

I went to the local Japanese grocery store yesterday. Since I don't cook, I typically spend most of my time in the candy aisle.

I can read some Japanese, but that's not always enough to figure out what things are - turns out Japanese fruit-flavored candies come in a few flavors that we don't use. One is muscat, which I've seen before but haven't tasted, and the one I bought yesterday, acerola.

Muscat is a kind of grape, and the candy usually has pictures of green grapes on the package. Wikipedia says it's one of the few grapes eligible for making sherry.

Acerola is a totally different plant from anything we eat. I've heard of it before, mainly in vitamin supplements - apparently it's a potent source of vitamin C. It's a berry, like a crabapple or cherry, that grows on a little shrub in the West Indies and South America. The flavor is similar to sour cherry, but supposedly the plants aren't related - and the fruit only looks a little like cherries, from the pictures I saw. The candy was pretty good.

Then there's lychee, which is more and more common here now. They show up in the produce department at Whole Foods occasionally, and we've actually been buying bags of lychee gummy candies from the Asian grocery store for a few months. I was happy to finally learn how to pronounce lychee from the Japanese kana on the bag - the first syllable rhymes with fly, not with see. I'm a big fan of the candy, though one of my friends said it kind of tasted like perfume.

There's another mysterious Japanese fruit I've encountered in non-candy form at a local restaurant: yamamomo. It looks a little like a lychee from the outside, but it's more like a raspberry, with little sections. I think the name is fun to say (I'm guessing it means "mountain peach" but you never know with Japanese, there are so many homonyms). Yamamomo. Ha.