Food note: fruit

When you go into a restaurant of any pretensions, the first thing that comes around after the menu (or even before) is a plate of fruit. What you are being offered is a your choice of fruit for a fruit drink, with the caipirinha as the model. The classic caipirinha is made from cachaça, the sugar cane spirit that is all over Brazil, with lime, a bit of sugar, and ice. It can also be made with other fruit, and the fruit tray in this picture has a mango in the center, and clockwise from the strawberries, limes and passion fruit, the cajú, a pinha, a cut graviola (this is a fairly small one), and grapes.

The cajú is quite interesting, as well as being attractive. The red-orange part is technically not the fruit, but a false fruit or peduncle. It is spongy inside with no internal structure, seeds, or membranes, and has a bland, somewhat astringent taste. The brownish thing on the top is the real fruit, which we call the cashew nut, and the Brazilians call a castanha. The nut itself is inside a coarse hull, which is quite poisonous, as it contains urushiol, the same irritant that is in poison ivy. The cajú, a small tree, is native to this part of Brazil, and the fruits are sold in grocery stores and by roadside vendors.