Little Balls

On a post-lunch ride to the wall with the god yesterday, I struck a long-faced, pith-helmeted bloke with a bike, a set of scales and bunches of balls. Red and yellow balls. Meticulously bunched, from a distance they resembled malnourished lychees. Up close, on the corner of Ba Trieu and Nguyen Du streets, where this bloke works in tandem with some pink rose sellers, the fruit's altogether berry like.

Grown in Ha Dong on the outskirts of Hanoi in the summer, I hadn't clapped eyes on these in four previous hot seasons. Purchasing fruit in Hanoi is a 'try-before-you-buy' experiment, a bit of bluff and negotiation, a raised voice, a smile and, all being well, an agreement. Our vendor clipped off a sample of his wares which we duly popped in our fruit holes.

The flesh is yellow, sweet like a ripe plum but there's not much of it. Most of this berry is a big pip, some of which you can see scattered about on the road in the photograph. In Vietnamese, they go by the name of soan dao (dao meaning peach).

In English, your guess is as good as mine?

Comments

[girl]

That looks like the fruit I used to get which I loved, but had a few experiences where I realised after eating half of it that my fruit also contained protein. Maybe it means 'yummy-unless-you-get-a-grub peach'!

[Robyn]

Is the fruit segmented? If so then I guess it's duku or langsat (Lansium domesticum). If not, then gandaria (Bouea macrophylla?).

[jenjen]

i love the colours, so vibrant!

[Sticky]

These are tiny, smaller than nuts. It isn't segmented Robyn and I checked the gandaria, for which the description says it's slightly smaller than a mango!

I'm still at a bit of a loss.

[panasianbiz]

It definitely sounds like a peach if it has a giant pip in the middle. Although with it being so small, could it be more like a cherry? Maybe there is no Western equivalent and it is only indigenous to South East Asia or Vietnam?

[Juliet]

They're called longans. Those aren't quite ripe.

[Chris]

These do look a lot like longans (long nhãn, trái nhãn) but the name you give here is possibly a misspelling of xoan dâu aka dâu da xoan, which is neem fruit (Azadirachta indica).There's a lot of confusion over several trees that are related to each other and which have similar names, but one kind has poisonous fruits, called Chinaberry, (Melia azedarach), with purple flowers. The neem has white flowers. Some sources say the neem fruit is poisonous too. Both trees are in the same family.