When Flavours Cross Borders
Discovering how one fruit links childhood memories from Türkiye to Japan
When I first moved to Türkiye and began wandering through the outdoor markets, I kept noticing baskets of small, bright green fruit. They were called erik in Turkish, but they didn’t look like any plums I knew. Curious but hesitant, I passed them by week after week.
Taste buds, after all, don’t need translation.
One day, I was at the market with an Iranian friend. She spotted the little green plums and immediately lit up. “Oh, I love these! I used to eat them all the time as a kid,” she said, her voice full of nostalgia. The stall keeper noticed our interest and, with the casual generosity you find so often in Turkish markets, offered us some to try.
Before I could even take a bite, he sprinkled salt over them. I paused, intrigued. Salt? Interesting. Maybe it’s like putting Tajín on watermelon? My friend popped one in her mouth without hesitation, crunching happily, while I watched her eyes sparkle with memory.
I bit into mine. The taste hit me all at once: shockingly tart, slightly tannic, crisp like a green apple but with an edge that made my whole face pucker. The salt only intensified the jolt. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly—but it wasn’t what I’d call delicious either. I politely finished the fruit, smiling through the tartness, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the taste was tugging at some forgotten corner of my memory.
We moved on, wandering through stalls of herbs, cheeses, and olives, yet the flavour lingered on my tongue like an echo. I knew I had encountered it before, but I couldn’t place it.
A few weeks later, I joined a picnic with a group of Iranian friends. As we sat on blankets under the sun, they brought out bags of the same little green plums. One by one, they sprinkled them with salt and crunched through them with the same joy I’d seen at the market. Watching them, it dawned on me: this was their sunflower seed snack, their summer ritual, the taste of their childhood summers.
I took another bite, and then it clicked. Suddenly I was back in Japan. The flavour was umeboshi—pickled unripe Japanese plums. As a child, I had never seen the fruit in its raw state, only after it had been salted, dried, and transformed. I remembered my grandmother setting trays of plums outside to dry in the sun, the fruit basking in the intense summer heat. I remembered onigiri stuffed with umeboshi, the salty tang cutting through plain rice, or bowls of ochazuke warmed by tea and brightened by chunks of pickled plum. That taste I couldn’t name in the market was, in fact, embedded deep in my childhood as well.
What amazed me most was the connection: in Türkiye, in Iran, in Japan—different lands, languages, and traditions—people were drawn to treat this one fruit in nearly the same way. Pair it with salt, balance its sharp acidity, and turn it into a memorable flavour.
It reminded me how peculiar and yet how profoundly similar humans are. Without ever speaking to each other across borders, we arrive at the same solutions, the same pleasures, the same way of eating. Taste buds, after all, don’t need translation.
And this isn’t just true for plums. Across the world, people converge on similar instincts: in Mexico, mango with chili and lime appears as Chamoy de Mango; in Thailand, the same idea shows up as Jeow Mak Muang with green mango, salt, and chili. Roasted corn rubbed with spice and citrus is enjoyed as Cancha in Peru and as Makai Butta in India. Yogurt with cucumber cools palates as Cacık in Türkiye and Raita in India.
That day at the market taught me something about us as people— that even across waters, borders, and languages, we are connected by the simple act of tasting, and by the shared delight of discovering how something should be eaten. If a small green plum can reveal that kind of connection, maybe every bite holds the possibility of seeing ourselves in one another.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to see more, I would be happy if you bought me a coffee to keep me going! I’m often out on the street with my camera in hand and at a cafe sipping my cortado while I edit and write stories.
I would love to hear about a food that is deeply rooted in your childhood. What always takes you back every time you eat it, and why?