The King of Fruits....

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

It’s impossible to live here in Malaysia without encountering the objects in the photograph above. What are they? Well, despite appearances, they are not footballs, or the latest fashion in bathroom back-scratchers. If they were, believe me, H1N1 would be the least of the Malaysian health system’s worries, and the stock price for the company that makes Band Aids would go through the roof!

No, of course, they are durians! The King of Fruits!! Malaysia’s very own culinary secret weapon!!! And...it’s now the Durian Season!!! Yippeeeee!!

Before I recover from my entirely fake spasms of anticipation, I must justify why it is that durians, despite the fascination of their spiky exterior and their apparent pungent squishiness inside, do very little for me. I would have much more fun sucking my thumb, to be totally honest...

For one thing, the fruit is a dangerous weapon – large, heavy and covered in sharp spikes. I heard an awful story the other day of a man who was made quadriplegic because a durian fell out of a tree and hit him on the head. I’ll bet he doesn’t eat them either...

But the big problem for me is the taste and the texture, because I don’t go anywhere near durian trees and in any case wouldn’t know one if I saw one...

“Whoa there, Prof. Madder”, I hear you all call out indignantly, “surely you must have developed a TASTE for the King of Fruits in all your years in our beautiful country? Surely, you just haven’t tried enough of them.....”

Well, let me tell you a little story, a story about high hopes and broken dreams. It all started sometime at the end of the 1990s, when I first came over to Sarawak.

One evening, a neighbour took me to a vast, crowded and sweaty market (Satok, I think) to show me my first durians. I suppose my neighbour felt he was putting me through a rite of passage, a bit like eating deep-fried crickets in Bangkok, or sucking on the hookah pipes in Cairo. Part of the visitor’s itinerary...

I had heard a lot about durians then – they had already taken on a semi-legendary aura, based on stories passed on to me by friends who had visited South East Asia before and had been transported by the delights of this most strikingly original fruit.

So I was naturally delighted to be given the privilege of trying one for the first time. So, my new friend, a teacher from the same school as my wife, carefully selected a big, green particularly spiky and convincing durian from among a great heap on sale in the market. He tested it by shaking it gently, placing it against his ear (ouch!) and generally carrying and weighing it reverently, like a newborn baby with spikes!

Back home, we all participated in The Tasting.

To start off with, the spiky, hard surface of the thing had to be opened somehow. Durians are not like apples and oranges, which can be bitten into or easily pealed. If you try to bite into a durian it’s gonna make your dentist rich, and your mouth will have more holes than a Swiss cheese.

So to open the durian, my friend simply felt with his fingertips until he found the natural fault lines in the shell, and slowly pulled the thing apart until it split cleanly in two. It was at this point that I realised that durians, as culinary objects rather than weapons, are notable for what is inside the shell – in this case the soft, pulpy flesh that surrounds the seeds. It looks something like this:


Source: http://www.petertan.com/blog/2004/05/20/durians-durians-everywhere/

I was immediately struck by how much the insides of a durian resemble something alive, like the eldritch foetuses inside some alien creature’s womb. I could almost imagine them palpitating grotesquely as they feed on the life blood of their spiky host. I had visions of one of the grisly things suddenly quivering violently and popping out of the shell, blind eyes searching for a new host in the form of the nearest foreign visitor...

But, I am nothing if not a culinary diplomat, so I kept these thoughts to myself as I buried my fingertips in the yellowish goo and took out some of the stuff to try. It felt smooth. It felt soft. It felt gooey. But I put some of it in my mouth...

What happened next was a total surprise. Based on the somewhat pungent, gassy smell that comes off a durian before you actually eat it, I expected to taste something that was creamy, perhaps fruity, I don’t know... But what I got was a very strong flavour of tuna and onion mixed together with mayonnaise – just like one of my favourite sandwich fillings back home but definitely not what I would expect in a fruit.

I tasted a little more of the oniony, gassy mixture and was repelled by it. I threw it away, subtly so as not to upset my neighbour, and I decided then and there that durians were not for me.

It’s all about programming, I think. All my life, I have been programmed to expect sweetish flavours from fruits and savoury flavours from things that are not fruits, such as onions, tuna and cheese. I just cannot accept a fruit which doesn’t taste like a fruit.. And the pervy squishiness of the flesh around the seeds doesn’t help either.

Many people are put off by the smell of durians – “smells like hell, tastes like heaven” as the local saying goes. Personally, I can take the smell, which is like a slight gas leak, but the texture and the associations it sets up in my psyche mean that I have to avoid the king of fruits, deferring that pleasure for another lifetime.

Let me finish, then, with some Wikipedia quotes on durians which in many ways provide support for my own feelings about this contentious fruit. Firstly, Anthony Burgess, who would have known what he was talking about, likened eating durians to "[...] eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory”. Yessssss......Except I like sweet raspberry blancmange!

And let us hear from two chefs. Firstly, Andrew Zimmern compares the taste of durians to "completely rotten, mushy onions." Obviously, he has taste buds similar to mine! And finally, the excellent Anthony Bourdain says: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

My thoughts exactly...