I have a jar of Indian "gooseberry pickle" in front of me. It's
yellowish-green spherical fruit about an inch across in oil and
spices. The fruit are the same colour right through, with a
slightly crunchy texture like pickled walnuts. There is one stone
in the middle of each fruit, pear-shaped with six sharp longitudinal
symmetric ridges and three small tufts at 120-degree angles at the
bottom (attached to three of the ridges). The fruit (whole) and the
spicy oil are the only ingredients.
So what the heck is it? Pickled baby triffid?
This doesn't seem to match your description:
http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/im...ikaya/amla.jpg
Actually that one probably does. The pips are almost perfect hexagons
in cross-section (I should have used a different word than "ridge"
perhaps), and the thing in the picture is consistent with that. The
colour of the pickle (military yellow-green) presumably comes from the
spices, mainly turmeric.
I can't find a good botanical drawing of the seed on the web. The tufts
at the bottom are very distinctive (and there aren't many seeds with
obvious threefold symmetry, the only other one I can think of is the
coconut).
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