Salacca is a genus of 20 species of palms

Arecaceae

Arecaceae or Palmae , are a family of flowering plants, the only family in the monocot order Arecales. There are roughly 202 currently known genera with around 2600 species, most of which are restricted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates...

 native to Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. They are very short-stemmed palms, with leaves

Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants....

 up to 6–8 m long. The leaves have a spiny petiole; in most species they are pinnate with numerous leaflets, but some species, notably S. magnifica, have undivided leaves.

The fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

 grow in clusters at the base of the plants, and are edible in many species, with a reddish-brown scaly skin covering a white pulp and one to two large inedible seeds. The Salak

Salak

Salak is a species of palm tree native to Indonesia. It is a very short-stemmed palm, with leaves up to long; each leaf has a 2-metre long petiole with spines up to long, and numerous leaflets....

(S. zalacca) is the species most widely grown for the fruit, which has a slight acidic taste.

The skin of the Salacca fruit has a unique texture not unlike that of a snake's skin, rough to the touch in one direction but smooth in the other.