Persimmons: America’s Forgotten Fruit
My deep affection for persimmons began when I worked as a farm laborer at an orchard in southern Virginia, where the tall, sturdy, trees with wide, broad leaves and cheerful white and purple flowers colored my work day with aesthetic beauty. As I labored in the evenings of October and November and supper was still a few hours out of reach, I would pause my work for a few minutes and scour the ground in their generous shade, searching for their delicious fruits, pressing my thumb into their jelly-like, day-glo orange, flesh and slurping their insides.
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to be introduced to this delicious, but uncommon American fruit, you’re probably wondering one of two things — how I was able to contain myself in an abundance of this delectable treat, or how I must have temporarily lost my mind for casually eating a semi-toxic fruit that turns your mouth inside-out in the first bite. The thing about persimmons is: it’s easy to have incredibly varying experiences when tasting it for the first time.
The explanation for this is pretty simple. Persimmons, when even slightly unripe, are starchy at best and straight-up inedible at worst. The tannins of an unripe persimmon are intense, and will absolutely suck all of the moisture out of your mouth within seconds. What makes this remarkable quirk even worse is that it can take several days, and possibly even weeks for a store-bought persimmon to fully ripen, and when it finally does, you’re left with a goopy, seemingly rotten mess on your counter. This leads to the single greatest misunderstanding of this magical fruit — the assumption that it simply tastes like shit. But if you’ve eaten a ripe persimmon, you know how tragically wrong this assumption is.
The fruit of a fresh, ripe, persimmon is incomparably exquisite. Its flavor profile is sometimes compared to a banana, but I think it’s closer to cinnamon and honey. The texture ranges from apricot or peach to marmalade, depending on how patiently you are able to wait.
It’s possible that the wild contrast in flavors and textures in ripe and unripe persimmons may have contributed to the many projected reasons why this delicacy never caught on in post-colonial America, but another widely accepted explanation is their inconsistent modest yield of fruit, their long, uneventful seasons, and the laborious harvest required to produce a fruit that most Americans are skeptical of.
Another reason is that American persimmons, also known as common persimmons, or possum fruit, are a much smaller variety than their cousins the Fuyu or Hachiya persimmons whose fruits are cultivated over 400 times more than American persimmons in places like China, South Korea, and Japan.
Lastly, a giant hurdle in the way of American persimmon cultivation is germination. Both male and female trees are necessary for the fruits, and there’s no way to tell the difference until the tree is fully mature (between four to eight years).
While persimmons of all varieties are lacking in American supermarkets, I have to insist that you find a way to try them. The most commonly accessible varieties are ones I mentioned earlier in the article, Fuyu and Hachiya, my favorite of the two being Hachiya. But if you live in the southern United States, I suggest taking a walk in the woods in November to try and sniff out the elusive common variety which is native to your area or trying to seek out a small-scale orchard that might be cultivating one of over 200 varieties of this special fruit we call the persimmon.
Recipes
Persimmon Pudding: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/13715/persimmon-pudding/
Persimmon Jam:
https://www.runningtothekitchen.com/persimmon-jam/
Persimmon Bread:
https://natashaskitchen.com/persimmon-bread-recipe/
Persimmon Beer:
As always, thank you for reading. This article only details three specific varieties of persimmons, but there are over 200 unique varieties found in every corner of the world. If you have tried one of these special, lesser-known types, I’d love to hear about them in the comments, or send me a line at geneglarosh@gmail.com and let me know how what you thought, and how I can get my hands on one of them!
