Fruit of the Month Club XI

We found this sitting in the middle of other, more innocuous looking items and just had to buy it.


Would you guess that it’s
(a) the tentacles of a yellow squid?
(b) Medusa’s new highlights?
(c) a sunlit sea anemone?
(d) Buddha’s hand?

Oddly enough, it’s a fruit called Buddha’s hand. The whole thing looks like this:


What’s inside? Well, we cut it open, and from the look and the smell, we deduced that a Buddha’s hand is . . . a weirdly shaped lemon. With nothing but pith inside. No juice, no seeds, just the white stuff, though there is a nice lemony fragrance.

No one we asked could tell us how to cook or eat it; apparently it’s mostly used as decoration during Chinese New Year along with other “lucky” fruits.