Fruit of the day: mystery fruit

The mystery fruit. Roughly a foot long, a slick smooth maroon skin. Slightly soft to the touch, and visibly rotting on one end. It smelled kind of sweet, and kind of rotten.

This has been a real puzzler. I found it in the garage, and couldn't get any worker to claim it or its origin. I carried it around the market, asking different vendor friends if they could identify it, all to a big fat nothing. It seems nobody had seen one before.

So I finally just busted it open for a taste, hoping that would help me narrow down my searching.

Inside was soft fruit flesh surrounding a central channel of wet seeds. It reminded me of cucumber, and the taste was slightly cucumber-ish too. Light and somehow cooling. Sweeter than a cucumber with more of a flowery taste.

In the whole wide internet, here is what I found:

Sicana odorifera- Family: Curcurbitaceae. Long vines with attract glossy green leaves. 2 inch bright yellow male flowers. Female flowers are a little smaller with a young fruit attached to the base; it develops if pollinated. Hard shelled fruits ripen to orange, red or black. Fruits are scented and have a melon-like flavor. Seeds are periodically available.       the source

Sicana odorifera, the only species of the genus Sicana, is a large, herbaceous perennial vine native to tropical South America, grown as an ornamental plant and for its sweet edible fruit. English names include cassabanana or casbanan, sikana, and musk cucumber. The fruit is large, up to 60 cm long, with skin of variable color. The fruit has a delicious, melon-like taste when it is ripe, which needs high temperatures to ripen. The sweet, aromatic, yellow-to-orange flesh of the mature fruit is eaten raw or made into preserves. The immature fruit can be cooked as a vegetable.     the source

this picture I didn't take, might explain why the end was kinda nasty