Jack Campin - bogus address a écrit :
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.

It's labelled in five languages. One is Urdu which would presumably
give me the real scoop if I could read it. The others:

English: gooseberry
French: groseille a maquereau
German: stachelbeere
Italian: uva spina

No Linnaean binomial.

So what the heck is it? Pickled baby triffid?


I don't know, but from the description it is not what it advertises to
be, in fact in french, english and german it pretends to be 'Ribes
uva-crispa' which is patently not the description of the fruit you give.

Perhaps it could be fruits of the indian gooseberry or amla :
'Phyllanthus emblica' of which I can't get a good description at this time.
--
Greetings, Salutations,
Guiraud Belissen, Château du Ciel, Drachenwald,
Chris CII, Rennes, France