The Durian
If there is such a thing as a legendary fruit, it is the durian. In the nineteenth century, travelers to the rain forests of Southeast Asia would return to civilization with tales of a tropical fruit that surpassed anything known to western man. Only a few intrepid travelers tasted this fruit, and its reputation grew as the decades passed. It was the fruit with the repellent smell but the heavenly taste. One hesitated to take a bite of this stinking fruit, but taking a bite left one transported.
I first learned of the durian a quarter of a century ago from a travel book written by Alfred Russel Wallace, who was, along with Darwin, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, and I have been following this fruit ever since. I learned that it is a bipolar fruit that is praised immoderately by some and shunned as stomach-turningly inedible by others. The durian grew in my mind until it became the fruit of fruits.
Here are some excerpts from the work that fired my imagination: Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang--utan and the Bird of Paradise, tenth edition, Dover Publications, 1962 (first edition published in 1869, tenth edition in 1890), p. 57. Wallace quotes a traveler named Linschott, writing in 1599, as saying, "It is of such excellent taste that it surpasses in flavour all the other fruits of the world, according to those who have tasted it." Wallace goes on to quote another traveler, Dr. Paludanus, who says, "To those not used to it, it seems at first to smell like rotten onions, but immediately they have tasted it they prefer it to all other food. The natives give it honorable titles, exalt it, and make verses to it." Wallace then gives his own opinion.
When brought into a house the smell is often so offensive that some people can never bear to taste it. This was my own case when I first tried it in Malacca, but in Borneo I found a ripe fruit on the ground and, eating it out of doors, I at once became a confirmed Durian eater....the more you eat of it, the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durian is a new sensation, worth a voyage to the East to experience,.
You can understand why the Fruit Explorer lusted for this fruit.
The sad truth is that I have been unable to find fresh durian in this country. Since one of the unwritten rules of Fruit Exploring is that I only report on fresh fruit, it looks like the durian has escaped me and will not be included in this series.
I can, however, give you a durian anecdote. When Mei-Mei and Mei-Ling were traveling in Thailand, they stayed in a hotel that had signs announcing that under no circumstance was durian allowed in the rooms. Needless to say, the outlaw Mei-Mei smuggled a triple-wrapped durian into the room and stashed it in the mini-fridge; they then snacked on it at their leisure. Mei-Ling likens it to a sweet, stinky cheese. Mei-Mei liked the taste but said that the smell and the cloying sweetness got to her after a while. When they were ready to check out, Mei-Ling reports that the room reeked of durian. To hide their crime, one of them stood guard and the other raced down the hall and deposited the remainder of the durian in a hall trash can, thus stinking up the hall as well. As for why they didn't take it out of the hotel, imagine getting on an elevator while carrying a durian in full stink. (Jennifer confirms that these signs prohibiting durian are common in hotels in Malaysia as well and that durian is the only fruit so proscribed. Jennifer couldn't stomach durian even in the attenuated form of durian ice cream.)
The Wild Fruits of New England
At the beginning of the summer of 2014, I wrote the first two paragraphs of a draft Fruit Explorer e-mail titled, "The Fruit Explorer Goes Native."
All of the fruit that I have reported on so far has come from stores, but with the arrival of summer it is time to exploit the fruit that nature provides in the wild. I am not going to go crazy and report on a host of obscure wild fruits but will restrict myself to ones that you have probably heard of.Important note: Do not eat any wild plant that you find unless it has been definitively identified by Mike, me, or some other plant person. There are many poisonous plants out there. For example, water hemlock is common (in fact, it grows across the road from Pepe and Maria's Lake House in New Hampshire), and it looks enticingly like parsnip, to which it is closely related. One mouthful of water hemlock, however, can kill you.
I intended to add to this e-mail during the summer as I found wild fruits to report on.
The first wild fruit in my plans was the elderberry. There are two types of elderberry around here, the red-berried elder, which is infrequently seen around Boston but is much more common in northern New England, and the common elder, which is very common around Boston. The red-berried elder blooms and flowers about three weeks earlier than the common elder. In the third week of June 2014 Mike informed me that a red-berried elder was in fruit at Fresh Pond. This prompted me to get out my edible plant books so I could study up. (For something as important as eating wild plants, I don't trust the Internet and only use the books I have been using for decades.)
To my surprise, I found that the berries of red-berried elder were poisonous. I wasn't too worried since I was mainly planning to report on common elder anyway. But I found to my chagrin that the berries of common elder are not good when eaten raw. They need to be significantly processed to be made edible. Since significant processing is not in the portfolio of the Fruit Explorer, this ruled out a report on elderberry.
I also thought that I might report on huckleberries and sunflower seeds, but I did not stumble upon any during the summer.
In short, the summer of 2014 was a complete bust for wild fruit. (It is true that Pepe and Maria's Lake House produced a staggering harvest of blueberries, but the Fruit Explorer does not report on mainstream fruit.) We'll see if the summer of 2015 is more productive.
Breadfruit
Acting on a tip from Melia, last fall I popped over to Whole Foods and picked up a breadfruit. When I got to the check-out counter, the cashier knew it was breadfruit but she needed to key in its PLU code, and there was no PLU sticker on the fruit, She got out a book and started flipping through it so she could find the code. We had the following exchange.
Cashier: (Flipping) Do you know what family breadfruit is in?
Fruit Explorer: The Moraceae. (I was thinking how lucky she was to be dealing with the Fruit Explorer. I figure that not one shopper in a thousand could answer that question.)
C: (Continues flipping) Uhhhhh.
FE: (Seeing that she needed help) That's the mulberry family.
C: (Brightening) Oh, it's a berry. (Continues flipping. Eventually another cashier comes to her rescue and tells her the number.)
My breadfruit weighed 2.14 pounds and, at $1.99 a pound, cost $4.26. It's in the same family as jack fruit, and the resemblance is obvious. It is an ovaloid, with a substantial stem that looks like the jack fruit stem but smaller, and it is flecked with white, presumably the latex that I failed to see with my jack fruit.
One of the unwritten rules of fruit exploring is to avoid all elaborate preparation; after all, I'm not writing a cookbook. The Fruit Explorer's modus operandi is to cut it open and eat it raw. The main violation of this rule occurred with jack fruit seeds, but this was justified since jack fruit is above the rules. I decided to make another exception for breadfruit for two reasons. First, it is a famous fruit that I have never had, and it would be a shame to omit it from this series. Second, it is in the same family as jack fruit, and, therefore, it takes on some of the exemption from rules that falls to jack fruit.
That was the plan. What happened is that it was hard to find the time to learn how to prepare this fruit. Eventually, it went bad on my shelf, so I didn't eat it. At least I will get another crack at this fruit in the future.
(On 7 May 2015, I was excited to find that jack fruit was back at H Mart. Using my trained eye, I could tell that all of them were overripe and not worth buying.)
The Multitude of Fruits I Will Never See
Buford, Bill, in "Extreme Chocolate: The quest for the perfect bean," The New Yorker, 29 Oct 2007, p. 76, writes that he went to a market in Brazil and was:
"...introduced to hundreds of fruits, aisle after aisle of them. I bit into a bulbous caja-umbu [picture on the left], with so much juice it squirted me from head to foot, a long, curving , herbaceously fragrant yellow arc. I delicately ate my way around a caju [picture on the right], red like a tomato, pulpy like a mango, and with a pod on the outside that was fatally poisonous. A yellow berry, a caza [picture unavailable on the Internet], was so sweet and complex that it excited an entrepreneurial fantasy: should I try to export it?
Rick
P.S. Attached is my latest work of art, Sticker Shock IV, which covers 14 Mar - 7 May 2015. Throughout this period citrus continued at its peak, and you can see that I have eaten vast numbers of citrus, though this was already apparent from the e-mail on the efficiency of peeling citrus (25 Apr 2015), which covered 147 citrus fruits I had eaten. The most common fruit eaten is the large navel orange (#4012), with other big winners being cara cara (#3110), gold nugget (#4055), and kiwi (#4030), You can see that I have gotten more ambitious; the pink shows that I have used cara cara stickers to create a two-stage rocket, poised for take-off.
