OPINION
Updated
There’s a time of year that I, for one, have traditionally come to dread. It’s marked out for all to see in the fruit and veg in the local greengrocers.
I’m talking about the arrival of truckloads of persimmons. Persimmons have no reason to resist extinction. No more reason do they have to exist, than do chokoes. Yes, they are cheerfully orange at a grey time of year and yes, they have a squishy texture. But they have a dreadful mouth feel – not unlike something hacked up from a lower lobe of a diseased lung. And they have a more-or-less total lack of flavour.
Sorry, I meant to say that they have a very delicate perfume, quite reminiscent of Clag glue – that favourite staple of my early school years.
Not far behind the persimmons we notice the mandarins. I personally have no axe to grind with mandarins. Except the ones that have a seed content approaching 87 per cent. I quite like the mandarine zest that accumulates under the fingernails, the sticky fingers and the bucketload of skin one needs to dispose as part of the after-lunchtime ritual. Or not.
There are of course pomegranates to widen the choice of inedible fruit during the colder months. Pomegranates remind us that we are a culturally diverse nation, doffing our hats to Persia, North Africa and the Middle East. And like the inhabitants of those climes, they bring colour and texture to our otherwise bland Anglo fare. But they bring seeds. Man oh man, they are a seed-rich experience.
And quinces – that intriguing cross between apples and rocks. Thirty cents, and the greengrocer will fill up the boot of your car with quinces – because they are a such a sought-after delicacy. As an alternative, you might consider drying them and using them as a carbon-neutral source of bio-fuel. Or road base.
Strangely, quince paste is sometimes flogged as an antidote to blue cheese. The idea being that one smears some on a cracker, followed by blue cheese and then (incredibly) it’s supposed to be OK to eat. In my experience, quince paste makes an excellent emergency alternative to axle grease and should be part of every caravanner’s kit. Particularly if the tub is inexplicably lost interstate.
So what do these phoney pretenders to green-grocer shelf-space have in common? Answer: they need to have the absolute bejesus stewed out of them with the addition of two thirds of the Bundaberg sugar crop to be made into the kind of preserves that jostle for space up the back of the fridge behind the coleslaw. And compete, unsuccessfully with that rock of the school fete – Lemon Butter.
In recent years we’ve seen the arrival of new exotic fruit. I’m mindful of the dragon fruit – with lovely red, triffid-like skin and fruit with the flavour and texture of jellied sand with black sesame seeds thrown in by way of contrast.
What to do? It’s depressing to wander the aisles of the green grocer in the months lacking an “r”. Best to stay away for a while. I prefer to go for mainstream preserves during the discontent of our winter. I eek out a meagre existence on Poire William, maybe Slivovicz, Kirsch – at a pinch, Vodka citron. Sometimes I even resort to eating Californian pesticides harvested and imported as heavily disguised navel oranges or ruby red grapefruit.
In a desperate attempt to make it through to the first mango of the season, I sometimes revert to purchasing chestnuts – a relative newcomer to the Australian green grocery. These can sit in the pantry for months until the first mango of the new season arrives, pristine, in it’s orangy-red hugeness direct from the mango fields of the Northern Territory.
Like the first swallow returning to Capistrano, this mango is not for eating. The five dollar price tag covers just the transport cost. Flavour and texture are not included in the price. Colour, yes, but flavour and texture, no way.
But the chestnuts are divine. Not for eating, for reminding one of the romance of roast chestnuts in the snow on the Champs Elysees. I recommend that you do remember them this way – even if you have never been to Paris, I can faithfully report that winter fruit does not get better than this.
Purchase enough chestnuts to pan roast for two people. That would be two chestnuts. Then leave them in the pantry until the first stone fruit of the new season appears – and – throw the chestnuts out – saving you the trouble of third degree lacerations from trying to peel them, or third degree burns in the unlikely event that you CAN peel them and inadvertently put one in your mouth.
Oh, and if you’ve made it this far with the chestnuts, they will have a texture and a taste not unlike pencil erasers – completing (with the persimmon-Clag combination) the daily double of infants’ school taste reminiscences.
Not a good memory, but a memory, none-the-less. Glad to have one.
Mike Jones is a freelance writer.
Denis Cartledge said:
“No more reason do they have to exist, than do chokoes.”
Ahh chokoes, back when an air rifle cost five quid and a box of pellets around 2/6, and the only license needed was your imagination as to what chokoes would be.
I never found out what various neighbours thought as they peeled, boiled then cut up their chokoes to make relishes and pickles.
But I did find out after some 30+ years of my childhood cake making forays. My Mother was an excellent cook, so several of us children followed in her footsteps. Back then, 1950s and 60s, packet cake mixes didn’t exist. We just followed the time honored recipes and varied them according to the phases of the Moon, transits of Venus and the like.
Some unkind souls even stated that prize winning sponges were put away from one year’s Show to the next, but I digress.
In those small country towns most people went to church, religious or not. And several times a year the Church had a fete to raise money and do good. So us children, little sister 5, older sister 7 and me 9 would bake up a great layered butter cake and decorate it something tremendous. Then proudly take it up to the church on the day for it to be displayed and sold.
Being the urchins that we were, we wandered around looking at all the other stuff on sale then finding ours as a matter for comparison. But we never found our cakes. So we came to the conclusion that a certain family in the church took all the good cakes, which naturally included ours, home and had a great party with all their ill gotten gains. Such is the mental outlook of those of such tender ages.
So we started to “doctor” the cakes. In different cakes at different times. we used salt instead of sugar; we included eggshells; we used liberal quantities of cayenne pepper; the icing sugared top had other cooking ingredients included. And still the cakes never appeared.
As children grow up they move on, as we did with our cake making and donating.
Fast forward some 30+ears and I was visiting one of my sisters in Sydney and during the course of the many conversations and reminiscing, she asked “did I remember so and so, she went to to sunday school when we did?”. I said I did and asked why.
She told me that she had run into her a few weeks previously and they had coffee and started reminiscing and during the course of their conversations, she mentioned that her mother used to choose the best cakes and distribute them around the Old Folk’s Homes. My sister said that she didn’t say anything.
Everytime I think about it now I burst into laughter. The elderly folk must have dreaded the church coming around with these delicious looking cakes.
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
And there was I thinking it was about chokoes and it was really about elder abuse 🙂 Welcome to the Pig’s Arms, Dennis.
And man-o-man there was a lot of pellets in a box – and wasn’t it heavy !
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algernon1 said:
Thanks for this reprise Therese. Enjoyed. Tried to look at the archives at the ABC. They’ve culled the comments
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
Thanks, Algy. I was disappointed by the removal of the comments too. They sanitised my bio as well – ah the impermanence … There goes 15 seconds of fame.
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gerard oosterman said:
Yes, but their are chestnuts and chestnuts. They were lovely back in Holland and then I tried some here and…but….sorry…they were… awful, dry as ash and just as tasty.
As for dragon fruit, beautiful fruit and very colourful. I love it.
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
Hi Gez ! Well, the euro tastiness might be because the Dutch ones were raised below sea level 🙂 … and yes, I can’t argue that the colour of the skin of dragon fruit is not spectacular crimson – but the taste ? What taste ?
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Yvonne said:
Thank goodness someone else knows the truth about chestnuts. Bleh …
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
They look so delicious, don’t they with their glossy horsey colour…… SO disappointing.
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vivienne29 said:
Quince paste goes with real cheddar. Putting it with blue cheese would be bloody awful.
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
I’ll take than on advice, Viv !
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sandshoe said:
I now foresee if I purchased chestnuts… there was a discount bag of them in the out of date section with a giant price on it. Like v old pencil eraser eh I’m glad to know.
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
You’re welcome our dear ‘Shoe 🙂
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