Didn't recognise these at first when I stumbled across them in the West Indian grocery this afternoon.  I got a little closer to see what they were, and the perfume of the fruit created a sense-memory flash that collided with the image of the fruit, and OMG plum!  The fruit you see here is my association with the word plum, and I was probably about 13 the last time I saw or tasted one, picked fresh from the plum tree in Aunt Elaine and Uncle Lester's yard in their house in Trinidad.

Plums are small, about an inch long.  There isn't much flesh to them.  They're mostly skin and seed (the seed being that woody oblong thing, pale yellow, you see in one corner of the pic).  But the skin's edible, and what flesh there is is juicy and milky and sweet and tart with an ever-so-slightly acrid backbite reminiscent of cashew fruit juice, though much milder.

Nice lady in the grocery gave me two bags of them for the price of one, because it was end of day and about half the plums in each bag were mostly squish.  I'm counting every precious penny nowadays, but I spared a few bucks to take some of these home.  Got some juice on my hand as I picked the bags up, and startled and amused the people in the store by licking the juice right off my hand.  Caribbean people are generally in the habit of washing raw produce thoroughly before putting it in our mouths, lest we sicken from any nasties that might have taken the opportunity to multiply in the food.  Very smart thing to do, and I often got in trouble as a child for being too impatient to wait until something tasty had been washed.  But OMG plum!  By way of explanation I said to the woman behind the counter, "You know how long I ain't taste these?"

The skins of the ones I bought are a little tough; to make sure they'd sort of survive the long trip up here, they'd probably been picked a bit green.  Back home, if you can't wait for the plums to ripen on the tree, you can stew the green ones down in sugar and spices until you have a syrupy preserve.  Which you'd better then hide from your little girl if she was me, because I'd happily down a gallon of the stuff in short order.

OMG plum!