Fruit

Hefty with a smooth, orange-yellow skin, topped with a green lace collar around the stem: this is a persimmon. I''d never eaten on before but, inspired by the recipe of Indiana persimmon pudding in a Thanksgiving recipe list, I thought: why not find out?

After peeling, slicing and pureeing the mango-like flesh of 5 of the slippery fruit, adding lots of ingredients in a complicated sequence: sugar, eggs  then buttermilk and baking soda, then flour and heavy cream in three alternating stages, then mixing everything in the laboring blender, then baking for over an hour, I thought, 'This had better be good.'

Sure enough, the astringent taste of the fruit came through to me, and later, to my colleague who called the fruit by its Portuguese name 'caqui' and approved the recipe, and to the Mexico farmer who wants to shift his production to fruit trees from vegetables--whose plans got me thinking about tree fruits in general.

I remember in West Africa my first soursop. It astonished me with its completely new but delightful flavor of combined pineapple and banana. The spiky skin, the fibrous white flesh were like nothing I'd ever seen before.

I remember in one seaside town a large mango tree laden with fruit that people said was a diet mainstay during the hungry time of year. Mango. Completely unfamiliar to me then, How could I imagined its special flavor which has been described as a mixture between pineapple and peach. Yet all the X and Y descriptions fail to do justice to the bouquet, the texture, the unique of the flavor of each fruit.

The splendid peaches from my neighbor's tree across the street, small, with crystalline sugar gashes, the crunchy apples and juicy pears in pick-your-own orchards, the despised mulberry across the street...how many fruit trees...how many forms of pleasure offered to us.  The edible world is enormously rich in its variety, why do we not revel in it?  And equally, the visible, and tactile and auditory worlds. 'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.'

Much as I love the classic tree fruits of my youth, there are new loves ahead.  My next adventure will be the pawpaw, a sort of papaya-like fruit that grows wild west of the Appalachians east of the Mississippi. Why have I never heard of it before? Why isn't it in stores?  Indeed, how many items in even Baby Nat's, my local produce store, have I yet to sample? How much more of the world's great flavors--luscious, piquant, subtle--are just waiting for me to learn about and actually taste. I may have a lifetime of exploration ahead of me.

And rather than all the work entailed in making puddings just to sample the flavors, I'm going to follow the Mexican orchardist's advice and use them in ice-cream.

Initiator of diversity, thank you.