The title of this series is my own wording for a common enough saying, with variations like “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
The version in my (S.E. Chinese) dialect of Teochew is: “When you desire something, it is betel nut. When you don’t, it is weed.”
The betel nut tree looks like a very young or undernourished coconut tree, with clusters of betel nut which also look like under-developed coconut. Betel nut is chewed with slaked lime and betel leaves for stimulant and narcotic effects. A common practice in the Singapore of my childhood days, and in the Taiwan of 1975–76 when I was working there.
What has prompted this blog are cutaway and background shots of a fully-loaded, leafless persimmon tree in a YouTube video of a DIY undertaking that I recently dipped into.
Other names for the persimmon fruit are kaki (from the Japanese) and Sharon fruit (from Israel), just to name two, more commonly known ones in the market over here in the UK.
The persimmon fruit matures in late autumn and can stay on the tree until winter.
I’d grown up in Singapore eating bright orange (skin and flesh) fresh persimmon (in season only), and dried persimmon (柿餅 / 柿饼 / shì bǐng / "persimmon pancake", flattened and coated with icing sugar), both imported from China (I think), so I never saw the tree.
The price an impatient child in my childhood days paid for not waiting until the fresh fruit had ripened properly was to have his/her tongue fur up. (Googling the effect tells me it’s from the tannin, although I didn’t know what it was at the time, just that it must've been the sap from the unripened flesh.) Not a nice sensation, and one that is a strong deterrent to stealing a bite before time.
My next encounter with the fruit was in Taipei in 1975 when I was working there for Conoco Taiwan. I had just emerged from watching a matinée in the cinema area one day, and saw a man with two traditional Chinese wooden buckets, one on each end of his shoulder pole. Floating in the brine in the buckets were light yellow / pale orange halves, which he said were persimmon. Fully ripened persimmon has jelly consistency flesh; those light yellow / pale orange halves in his buckets definitely looked hard and crunchy. I decided to try one, even though I didn’t think one could eat unripened persimmon. No furring, and not bad, though not as sweet as the fully ripened version.
My third encounter was in Japan, where I’d stayed for six weeks into early autumn. I was walking along a back route to Machida train station one late afternoon when a bright orange blob fell from one of the trees lining the path, straight past the front of my face onto the ground in front of me. Splat! It was a ripened kaki fruit that had detached itself from the branch above. I looked up and saw that the whole path was lined by leafless trees, about the height of small-medium apple trees (about 8’–10’), all be-decked with bright orange baubles, like Christmas trees.
After I was made redundant in 2011, I spent my first winter on the French farm. (I usually went in the summer when there was plenty of work to do, picking mainly tomatoes and making preserves for the winter.)
I’d gone into the village (St Jean le Comtal in Gers, which is about a mile away from the farm) one day with the mistress of the farm, and not being able to speak French, I was waiting for her outside while she was catching up with the locals inside the village hall.
Pacing up and down the village street, I saw bright orange baubles on the ground: one here, one there. They looked like persimmons! Looking up, I saw a tree by this two-storey house, reaching up to the roof, so it was about 20’ tall. A completely leafless tree, be-decked with bright orange baubles of almost uniform size. The ground of the garden was littered with persimmons.
Why were they just left lying on the ground? I later asked the farm mistress. She said they were inedible.
I took a couple back to the farm and tried them. Yep, persimmons all right, but not terribly sweet. Maybe needed to be left on one side for a while to ripen.
I wish I’d gone back the following days to pick them up off the ground. I never went back to the French farm after that, so that opportunity is now lost forever.
(Singapore 1960s / Taiwan 1975 / Japan 1993 / France 2011)
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