Quick Quiz: Know Your Fruits?

Can you identify these fruits? Bonus points if you are NOT from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia.

I think there might be one that Singaporeans won’t be able to identify.

The featured picture is longans. The ones following, from top to bottom: dragon fruit, jackfruit, rambutan, longans, mangosteen, jujube, and durian!

I took my sweet friend Sandy Praske to a Chinese grocery store in Seven Corners, Va, because she said she’d never gone into an Asian supermarket before. I get it. It can be intimidating, the strange smells, different ingredients, different cuts of meat, and the live fish. Yay! We saw a live eel.

The first thing that greeted us was the jackfruit. It was huge. I put a a large mango on one for contrast. Jackfruit is the biggest fruit in the world.

Even to me, it looked wierd. And I grew up with a jackfruit tree at the back of our house. Our tree didn’t bear a lot of fruit. But each time it did, Mum got our gardener to cover it with newspaper to prevent whatever–birds, or bugs–from getting to it. When we lived in Manila, we had a jackfruit tree outside our bedroom window. That tree bore more fruit and it was such a wonder seeing these huge fruits longer than a watermelon hanging from a tree! Because of its scent–Sandy would describe it otherwise–it attracted a lot of critters.

In Singapore in my childhood, a man would come ask Mum for permission to get leaves from the jackfruit tree for his cows, or goats.  We watched him climb the tree, trim the tree limbs, fighting the ants that crawled over him, and drag the branches away.

The same guy also herded his cows through our neighborhood selling fresh milk. He would milk a cow right there and then. Mum excitedly agreed; she’d try anything. I remember the man gave us his bottle of milk which looked rather pale in color, not like the white milk in our triangular packs. Yes, in Singapore our fresh (homogenized, not like cowherd’s) Magnolia milk came in yellow and red triangular packs.

We kids were always so excited to see a herd of cows saunter up our street. You’d think I lived in the boonies in Singapore…but no, we didn’t live far from the city, off Moulmein Road, considered residential area. They had cows coming through our street. Singapore in the 1950-1960s! Can you imagine?

For my American friends, this is what Singapore looks like today. We lived about 15-20 minutes drive from there. It would have taken the cows a longer time.

That’s my jackfruit story. Sandy wondered how we’d eat them and when I saw the cut fruit, I told her to take a whiff and she made a face. Immediately, I had to introduce her to the durian. She ain’t smelled nuthin’ yet.

The durian. The king of all fruits. Deserving of a paragraph of its own.

I can write a devotion on a durian because only God could have created such a mysterious and elusive wonder. But first see Sandy’s reaction, compared to mine.

Sandy’s reaction is typical of anyone who has not grown up with durian, mangosteen and rambutans as common as peaches and apricots are to Californians. You smell the durian before you see it. To the uninitiated, it stinks. Something rotten is to put it euphemistically. For the durian lover, it’s divine.

With its sharp spikes, it looks quite treacherous. Indeed it is. In durian orchards, safety nets are spread under the trees to catch the spiky fruit the weight of a bowling ball when they ripen and fall to the ground. It’s not something you want falling on your head. My friend Debora Loppies, from Indonesia, said when they hear a durian fall in the night, everybody will rush out to try and nab it first.

This fruit takes skill to crack open. Someone said it was created only for man to enjoy; no animal can open it. Inside is the creamy edible part, and when perfect, tastes sweet, and bitter, and has the consistency of soft cheese or custard, but better. Typically, when we eat durian, we’d eat only durian and no dinner afterwards. We’d open and lay several durians on the floor. We’d sit on the floor, take a piece and savor slowly. You cannot eat durian on the run.

Typically, no one talks because it’s just one of those fruit you eat with conversations limited only to, “Hmmm.  Hmmm….so good.” “Try this one, it’s sweet,” or “it’s bitter”, which is a desired, taste, like dark chocolate. Funny enough, after we’ve had our fill, we’d wash our fingers with the seed, which we think clears the smell from your fingers. A friend of mine asked me why I’d do that instead of smelling the fingers for hours afterwards to remind yourself of its splendor.

When I ate durian with friends in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, we’d eat it on the balcony, outside the house because no one else can stand the smell in the house. My friend, Howard Kravitz, told his wife once that he thought their fridge had a dead rat. She had durian.

After durian, there’s little to talk about the other fruit–rambutans, the hairy red thing,  which is one of my favorite fruits.

For those from South East Asia, the strange-looking fruit is jujube, which my husband Ted recognized immediately, His mother had a tree like that in California. This one above is the golden variety. But the one in their yard was the regular red jujube, which the Chinese call, hung zao, wrongly translated as red dates. Click here for more on Red Date or Jujube.