Food History

Today I’m posting a little early. By ‘a little early,’ I mean at least twelve hours early. This is because today is unbelievably busy and I really don’t want to do what I normally do on an unbelievably busy day and post after midnight. Tomorrow, you see, is likewise frantic.

Today I want to talk about persimmons and medlars. This is partly because I have both in the house. I have one small bowl of medlars and have just made three giant jars of liqueur not to be opened for at least eighteen months. I have a giant bowl of persimmons and still have to decide what to do with them.

When the English settlers saw persimmons in North America, they compared them to medlars because both have very distinctive ways of ripening. You can’t eat them straight from the tree, but have to wait until they go all mushy. Both of them are early winter fruit and the ‘rotting’ that has to happen to make the fruit edible is triggered by frost, I believe.

This is called ‘bletting’ in a medlar, and I talked about it this time last year, when I set myself the exciting task of watching many medlars undergo the process. This year I was all kinds of blasé about bletting until I discovered the link made with persimmons because of it. I think my favourite mention (courtesy the OED because I couldn’t remember where I aw the quote originally) is from around 1612 where a guy called Strachey wrote in a work about Virginia “They haue a Plomb which they call Pessemmins like to a Meddeler in England, but of a deepe tawny cullour.”

Anyhow, all that is the background. What’s interesting about the Strachey statement and others is that they imply that persimmons were new to each and every one of the writers in question. This implies that they are solely found in North America.

Persimmons are North American, true, but they’re also found in China and Japan, as native species. What’s more, at least one of the major Japanese varieties doesn’t need its innards to jellify before it’s perfectly edible. You can cut it like an apple and crunch into it the moment you have it in your hands.

What’s interesting about this is that it means that the great travelers who wrote about persimmons in North America and compared them to plums and medlars had not actually traveled in China and Japan or to any place close enough to them to know about persimmons. This is using food history to help show the shape of the world. Lots of people knew lots about China and Japan in the seventeenth century. Just not everyone.

I guess I’m saying that different groups had different understanding of the world. Those people who were focused on the New World didn’t necessarily know much about other parts of the Old World.

There are good reasons for this, political and religious and socio-cultural, but what’s interesting to me is that how those people who were curious about all these new places could be entirely ignorant of the foodstuffs of their neighbours (from the same continent equals neighbouring in my book!). The Silk Road meant that there was far more regular travel between the two regions, than between Europe and North America at the same time. Yet regular contact still only meant irregular knowledge.

This is how persimmons and medlars can help us understand the shape of knowledge. Understanding the history of the way we see fruit can help us understand the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.