adventures in consumption: persimmon

ne thing that I don't exactly share with the French is their food philosophy. They treat it as if it were a science, which I guess is what happens when you've been accumulating food rules. And there are a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken - a baguette must have a particular weight, you use butter to stick the cheese to your bread, beer and not wine is had with Chinese food. They are Serious about their food. Every meal is an elaborate ordeal.

I'm all for elaborate food alchemy, but as it turns out, when left to my own devices - such as being allowed to feed myself for a weekend - I default to the diet of some kind of wandering nomad peasant. That is to say that two or three of my meals per day tend to consist of some combination of bread, cheese, yogurt, and fruit. Every once in a while Philippe comes home, looks in the refrigerator, and says, "There's nothing gone from here, what did you eat for the past two days?" And, judging by his reaction, "Mainly apples and cheese" is not a satisfactory answer.

The truth is I just really like bread, cheese, yogurt and fruit, and as I've mentioned here before, the fruit selection in Paris is too good not to take advantage of. So today, despite it being a holiday and therefore all of the stores being closed, I went out on a mission: I was going to buy a persimmon.

I'd never had a persimmon, with the possible exception of some persimmon pudding someone brought me at school once, so I didn't actually know if I liked them or not. Actually, I had never actually seen a persimmon, even though they grow in the southern US so I could probably find one around Maryland if I looked hard enough. Also whenever I asked anyone if they had even had one, the only stories they had were unpleasant ones. But still! No one becomes a fruit-eating champion by avoiding things that sound bad, and I am determined to succeed in the area of fruit-eating.

So I put on my new boots and went out, confident that I would be able to find the one produce stand open on a mysterious religious holiday. And, lo and behold, there it was, and I purchased my persimmon, which is "kaki" in French, or whatever language they borrowed that from, and which was a lovely red-orange and bruised under the gentle force of me trying to pick it up, which I took as a good sign. And I took it home and cut the end off with my Swiss army knife, because I am kind of a boy scout. And I hesitated for a second and thought, "How am I supposed to do this? Whatever, I'm just going to eat this with my hands like a savage beast," and proceeded to do so.

Now here is the only way that I can describe this persimmon: Imagine that you have a peach or something, the kind of fruit that's slightly fibrous inside but gets softer and softer as it matures. And then imagine that you take this peach and just leave it out to ripen far beyond the recommended time, but instead of turning into brown mush it just keep getting riper and riper until it is softer and sweeter than any peach imaginable, and at some point it will reach the peach singularity and transcend into a freakish level of fruit...ness. And that is what a properly ripe persimmon is like.

It was soft and pulpy, like I could have eaten it even if I was a baby or a toothless old person, and ridiculously sweet. Eventually I became so covered in juice I abandoned my original plan and used a spoon to scoop the inside right out of the skin. (I have heard of people putting these in the freezer and then eating the frozen slush out of them, which sounds delicious.) I should have taken a picture of it, because it was a terribly pretty fruit, but by the time I thought of it I was covered in slippery yellow pulp and felt like I had just eaten several spoonfuls of sugar.

So that is the story of the first time I had a persimmon.