Persimmons

The advantage to living in California is the ability to grow all sorts of fruit, especially those that are hard to come by in the supermarkets. If you are lucky, you have a large lot where you can grow your own persimmons, figs, avocados and guavas, in addition to the easier to acquire oranges and clementines (which we called tangerines). It had always been my desire to join the California Rare Fruit Growers ever since I heard about them before moving to Colombia in 1973. Unfortunately there's not much opportunity to grow tropical fruit in Western Pennsylvania (although I do have a kaffir lime tree...).

My grandmother, who lived in the same little town as we did, had a hachiya persimmon tree (the kind that you have to eat when very soft and ripe) and so I grew up liking persimmons (although my sisters never developed the same taste). The tree is still there and is more than 50 years old. We generally ate them fresh but now I must admit that I prefer the harder Fuyu persimmons that you can eat when still crisp. I never tried Fuyus until I was in college and my father and I picked them from a tree belonging to one of his patients. At that time they were not seedless and still had beautiful brown seeds in them. Even today it is a treat to come across the occasional seed. My mother now has both a hachiya and a fuyu tree - satisfying both fresh eating and cooking needs.

My grandmother made the best persimmon cookies I have ever had. They were large, about 5 inches across, flat and chewy and a very dark reddish orange in color with raisins and walnuts. I have handwritten recipes for them but have never been able to duplicate them. She made huge batches of them and stored them in crisco cans for distributing as treats after her afterschool Child Evangelist bible classes. The trick may have been the fact that she used lard, as she also did in her cherry pie crusts.

For Thanksgiving and Christmas we always had persimmon pudding, a favorite of my father's. It's been awhile since I've had it but I believe we served it with a lemon brandy sauce. These days if I cook with persimmons, which my mother still sends me, I prefer to make persimmon bread with dates. Sunset had a recipe for one that was sweet enough on its own and didn't use added sugar.

Jordan's California Home Cooking has one recipe for persimmon bread in which she prepares the fruit by cutting the persimmons in half, discarding the pits (?) and rubbing the flesh through a sieve. That's not the way I would do it and using Hachiya persimmons you don't have "pits" and very seldom run across seeds in Fuyus. Instead, you get a couple of very ripe Hachiya, remove the stem (and any adhering cottony cushion scale), wash them and throw them into the blender with a teaspon of baking soda. After blending smooth, let the mixture sit for a few minutes and it will become a very beautiful congealed mass of orange. Harold McGee should be able to tell us what scientific process is at work here. Then you can add it to the egg/sugar/butter mixture, followed by the flour.

When you have a persimmon tree you are always on the lookout for ways to use persimmons. This winter when I was in California, I picked Fuyus, sliced them and dried them in the oven. I haven't used them yet but I'll try chopping them up and tossing them into persimmon bread instead of/or in addition to raisins. I still have several Hachiyas in the freezer. As the persimmons get ripe, I put them in a sandwich bag and freeze them for later use in cooking.