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The other day, in the aftermath of the cloud of rain that washed over us, I was driving along River Road when I saw a vision that took me straight back to my childhood. Rising above the steep slope of someone’s lawn was the dark gray reach of a winter tree, and high, high in its stark, leafless branches, hung, like minimalist ornaments, the rounded flames of November persimmons. Growing up in the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley in California, I had a persimmon tree in my backyard. Many people did. I think, as a child, I took autumn’s bright orange balls for granted because they were there every year, and they were messy, besides. If allowed to drop, ripe, from the tree, they hit the leaf-strewn ground with a splat and became slippery underfoot. Once, I rolled down the brown grass of a November hillside over the top of a ripe persimmon and stood up covered in the fruit. It’s a memory that’s never left me. They were odd to eat. Ripe, they were soft in the hand with a mellow sweetness on the tongue until my lips touched the bright, bitter skin. Then everything recoiled. Unripe, they were inedible. At some point, my mother learned to cook with them, and I began to look at them differently. I began to notice that when all the orchard trees dropped their leaves; when the fruit was long picked and dried from the Italian plum and the apricot trees; when the small donkey who inhabited the corral in our yard had all but climbed the apple tree to finish off what the windfall had not left him; then, the persimmon tree came into its own. It was an ambitious tree, a far-reaching dark gray in its branchy scope. Leafless, it might have been just another winter skeleton, but the persimmon tree boasted late autumn fruit. |
Through the silvered air rolling in from the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the persimmon tree glowed with the brilliance of its orange globes. They hung like treasures from that tree, mesmerizing and fastened too high to pick. My mother made cookies and pudding from their pulp, sending one of my height-addicted brothers up the smooth branches to retrieve the persimmons. She filled a basket on the dining room table with the bright unripe fruit and waited for it to ripen. The minimalism of color and roundness spoke to me of some distant memory of Asia, perhaps a dream from another life. If she needed the persimmons before they softened, she stuck them in the door to the freezer overnight. The next day, thawed, they were ready to be scooped from their skins and stirred into nutty, coriander-cinnamon-scented cookies or the rich gold custard of a Thanksgiving or Christmas pudding. Those cookies and the pudding became our staple holiday desserts, and it wasn’t until years later when I had discovered the bounty of cooking magazines that I realized the persimmon is a major player in the holiday season’s traditional steamed pudding. These bright globes are available in most grocery stores—or from your neighbor’s persimmon tree. Following is a recipe pulled from several sources and infused with the addition of spices from my mother’s persimmon custard pudding. Paired with a lemon sauce, it is decadently moist and spicy. It is a mouthful of Christmas. It belongs to November and December. |
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