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Syrians have a strange obsession with unripe fruits, and I am no exception. There is a beauty, a decadence in these cloyingly sweet berries and apricots dripping in juice.

However, there is no fruit more sentimental to me than an unripe sour green plum – preferably sourced from Syria. It is an exciting endeavor to hunt it at its peak unripeness. Too early, and it is flavorless; too late, and it is rotten. The peak season – typically mid-April to mid-May – is easy to miss, especially as it is only perfect for a week of that.

A few years ago, I found out that the anglicized version of the small green plum is called greengage, derived from the French “Reine-Claude” plum. I quickly realized it was not the same when the internet informed me of its 18% sugar content, honeyed sweetness, and significance as a dessert plum.

Dessert plum. Dessert plum.

Respectfully, Europeans are doing it wrong.

I much prefer the Arabic iteration of the tiny fruit: جانرك, janerek.

It likely derives from the Turkish words ‘can,’ meaning soul, life, beloved, and ‘erik’ meaning plum.

There is something poetic, and timeless about can erik. More so than naming the fruit after English botanist Sir William Gage, or French Queen Claude.

Janerek is meant to be eaten before it has had the time to sweeten. There is a subtlety, a lightness lost in some fruits when they become “ready to pick.”

Perhaps that is not fair from me, as these are treated as entirely different fruits, as they are picked at different times. In some ways – they have become entirely different fruits – some Middle Eastern strains of janerek are cultivated so as not to grow past their green stage. While greengages are wrong if not rich and sweet, janerek is perfect in its gloriously unripe state.

It is tart, like a granny smith apple, but its tanginess is more subtle. It is also crunchy, with a softness permeating through its translucent flesh.

The fruit is the embodiment of freshness, meant to be juxtaposed with a pinch of salt sprinkled over-top.

Sour and salty. Flavors of spring.

I missed janerek season this year – it was my first year living alone in the United States of America, and none of the grocery stores near me stocked it.

The last time I had it was the year prior, in my grandma’s apartment in Dubai. It was a few weeks before I moved away. Janerek is not naturally grown in the United Arab Emirates due to its scorching desert climate, but with hundreds of thousands of expats from the Eastern Mediterranean, like Syria and Lebanon, in the country, it is a common import of the season.

There is no guarantee, however, that the imports will be good. It’s a finicky fruit.

My grandma recently had a visitor from Syria, from the homeland, and they gifted her bags of janarek fruits, and she passed some off to me.

“They were picked too early,” Tete warned. “It’s too small.”

It was. I kept accidentally biting into the bitter seed in the middle, which kept latching onto the sparse flesh. It had not matured enough to build a firm shell and had the same hardness as the edible sphere around it.

All I could taste was the acrid seed permeating over the salt. Yet, for some reason, I could not stop eating them, plopping plum after plum, obsessively snacking as one would with a bag of popcorn or chips.

It did not really matter if it was good or not. I could neither bear nor afford to be picky, even as the bitterness became progressively more unpleasant.

It is because I can not go through spring without having janerek at least once. It is a habit ingrained in me from a young age, something so piercingly nostalgic, that to not eat it would be severing a tradition that has become part of me.

This year, I thought, was finally, unfortunately, the year for that to happen. I was in Chicago: where the fruit is unvalued, where hunting Middle Eastern grocery stores would be difficult amidst my busy schedule, and where I couldn’t just happen to pass by a place selling janerek.

Small plums were once a part of American horticulture. Former President Thomas Jefferson had twenty-one trees – of greengage, not janerek – at his home, according to In Bloom at Monticello. Cultivation of it has long since declined in the United States, however. It is much rarer today. Regrettably.

I went home to my family in Michigan the last weekend of May, past the growing season.

It was like my family knew I was yearning for it. I found a small plastic bag with a serving of two-week-old sour-green plums from Dearborn, MI – the Arab American capital of the United States.

It was still in near-mint condition, still good enough to eat, as if it had been waiting for me to come and find it.

When I put a few of the precious sour plums in a small bowl, sprinkling it with a dash of salt, I felt at home. I felt a rush of relief that this would not be the year I broke the cycle.

Long after finishing the bowl, I still tasted remnants of the brine that had coated my tongue. And I felt thankful that I know the fruit as janerek and not greengage, because unripe fruits are really and truly the soul of spring.