Davidson’s Plum

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Davidson’s plum Davidsonia pruriens, otherwise known as ooray, the fruit of a small tree found in the rainforests of Queensland and northern New South Wales in Australia. As one would expect from its generic name, it is excellent. Cribb and Cribb (1975) state:

We regard the ooray as one of the best native fruits we know. Its blue-black, plum-like fruits with a few loose hairs on the surface have a soft, juicy purple flesh with relatively small flattened seeds with fibrous coats. The fruit is very acid, but stewed with sugar or made into jam or jelly, it provides a distinctive and most enjoyable food for anyone who likes a sharp taste in preserves.