[Sca-cooks] OOP -- Persimmons

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach david friedman:
>>How would one use these?
>
>Persimmons are normally eaten raw, like other fruits. The one tricky 
>thing is that they have to be ripe, which means soft. Unripe 
>persimmons are astringent--they leave your mouth feeling as though 
>it ought to be puckering up. So you have to leave the persimmon 
>until it is soft--more like the texture of a tomato than an apple, 
>and more like a bag of skin filled with custard than like a tomato.
>
>At which point they are yummy.

Some authorities recommend leaving them on the tree until the first 
frost, which may have something to do with killing some astringent 
enzymes (they _are_ kind of puckery, something like a papaya), or 
converting starches to sugars. Alternately, it may simply mean you 
have to wait until they're good and ripe. See above.

I seem to remember Raymond Sokolov providing a recipe from somewhere 
or other, in his book "Fading Feasts" (which I now, of course, can't 
find, now that I actually need it), for a persimmon pudding. Kind of 
a cross between pumpkin pie filling and zucchini bread or carrot 
cake. As I recall it involved scooped-out persimmon pulp, flour, 
butter, sugar, eggs and spices, with chopped nuts and possibly some 
chopped dried fruit (I could be wrong on this last), all steamed in a 
pudding basin or baked. The end result was kind of like date-nut 
bread, which isn't too far off from plum pudding.

"Fading Feasts" is a great book, BTW; it's about the disappearance of 
certain elements of American regional cuisines, and to some extent 
proposes ways to fight this trend. The chapter on persimmons decries 
the disappearance of varieties either native to the Americas or which 
had been introduced early on in the European colonization, in favor 
of a recently-imported Japanese variety (believed by Sokolov, and 
possibly others, to be inferior).

Adamantius