Back in the days when I used to write things that were interesting, I did an occasional series on the unlikely cosmic fruits and vegetables that were on display in Russo's, the import market near our town. I haven't tried anything new from there in a while, but I was surprised to find this spiked battle-fruit in the normal supermarket - it fascinated me so much that I just had to bring it home and try it.

Despite looking like a clearly made-up weapon from Crash Bandicoot, this is a real fruit native to Africa that is variously called the horned cucumber, jelly melon or - slightly worryingly - the blowfish fruit. In the supermarket it was labelled as Horned Melon - and those spikes on the outside are genuinely hard and painful! They're not skin-piercingly sharp like rose thorns or the evil cactus pear that I tried a long time ago, but you definitely wouldn't want to drop it on any part of yourself, and you have to handle it gingerly to prevent painful results.

Once you've avoided injury and got it open with a knife, you're faced with this nonsense.


The contents at first glance are a jumble of green juice and seeds, but if you scrape them out and separate them, you'll notice that these are actually small triangular sacs of jelly-like flesh that each contain a seed at the centre, looking rather like something you would have to laser and excise in the later levels of a Trauma Center game. I'm not really sure how to approach eating it - I saw recommendations to just eat mouthfuls of the mixture and spit out the seeds but this is impossible, because the seeds are too small to really get a handle on in your mouth. They're not unpleasant to swallow, but it would be much more satisfactory if I could find a way of getting rid of them - perhaps sieving it into a juice?

As for taste, it took me a while to identify, as many of these fruits seem to fall somewhere on an indescribable range between cucumber and melon - but I realized after reading around that what it reminded me of was very specific - it's like eating a banana that isn't quite ripe yet, which has had a few drops of lemon juice spilled on to it. Its texture is different, but the taste is unmistakable once you realize it - it even has the same stringy, starchy and dry aftertaste that you feel in your mouth while regretting you didn't leave a banana until later. Apparently this is what the horned melon is meant to taste like when ripe, so I feel the banana is superior in virtually all respects.

As a last note, if not eaten when ripe it will allegedly explode to release its seeds, so perhaps this fruit is better suited as a weapon after all.