Durio zibethius!

Ice Creaminess

"Are you sure you want to try that?" the girl behind the counter asked, half smiling, half disgusted, completely incredulous.

After assuring her that, yes, I indeed did want to try the durian ice cream, she, after opening a fresh container, soon produced a white plastic spoon with a little dollop of yellowishness resting on it. My brother and girlfriend handed it to me as if I were the food tester, the canary in the coal mine. They too were skeptical and watched (in horror? in delight? in concern?) as I slid the spoon into my mouth. I can't quite say how I reacted. I may have wrinkled my nose a bit. Most likely I laughed. I probably urged them on as their tasting spoons were handed to them.

We all ended up ordering cups of differently flavored ice cream. The durian ice cream, interesting that it was, wasn't a hit.

The purveyor of such delicacies? The Boston Ice Cream Factory in Dorchester, Massachusetts, started by Steve Cirame, who must be one of the reigning local ice cream stars, opening Christina's in Inman Square twenty years ago. (For you non-Bostonians, there is an almost obscene abundance of spectacular ice cream shops around; Christina's is consistently rated as one of the local favorites.)

Durian, durian!

Ah, the durian. King of the fruits.

The 19th century English naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, in a letter to his countryman and botanist William Jackson Hooker, about the durian. (Wallace spent close to eight years in Southeast Asia conducting research and wrote a book recounting his travels, The Malay Archipeligo.)

In Borneo, he was struck by two "vegetable productions," bamboo and durian. While he has a lot of interesting things to say about bamboo, durian is the focus of the moment, and he too has quite a bit to say about this "second object of my especial admiration."



In his letter, he writes in ecstatic, colorful prose: "A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience...If I had to fix on two only as representing the perfection of the two classes, I should certainly choose the Durian and the Orange as the king and queen of fruits."

But wait. He doesn't end here with praises and shouts of glory. The durian has its...dark side.

"The Durian is however (in another way) dangerous. As a tree ripens the fruit falls daily and almost hourly, and accidents not unfrequently happen to persons walking or working under them. When a Durian strikes a man in its fall it produces a fearful wound, the strong spines tearing open the flesh, while the blow itself is very heavy; but from this very circumstance death rarely ensues, the copious effusion of blood preventing the inflammation which might otherwise take place."

David Karp, the Fruit Detective, about whom John Seabrook wrote in his wildly engaging profile for the April 19, 2002 New Yorker, wears a pith helmet while on the job of staking and seeking out fruit, fruit groves and fruit stories. Seabrook writes, "When I asked later if the pith helmet was necessary, Karp said that he was always getting clobbered by falling fruit, and that last year in Hawaii he had been struck on the head from the height of twenty feet by a durian--a delicious but terrible-smelling fruit familiar in Asia. 'Without my helmet, that durian would have killed me,' he said."

It's unlikely that the people native to Borneo, during Wallace's time, wore pith helmets for protection from durians tumbling from the sky. That said, it's quite possible that Wallace and other European travelers, traders, missionaries and colonialists did wear pith helmets. The helmet was popularized and worn by many Europeans on their exploits in the tropics beginning in the early 19th century.

Not all outsiders to southeast Asia have quite regarded the durian with such reverance as Wallace. The English writer Anthony Burgess, best known to me as the author of A Clockwork Orange, who worked for the British colonial service in Malaysia (then Malaya) in the 1950s, supposedly described eating durian this way: "like eating a magnificent raspberry blancmange in a foul public toilet." (I haven't confirmed the wording of this line, but apparently it appears in his 1956 novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan trilogy.)

Burgess is not alone in his dislike of the durian. It's a hard sell for many people, but for those who like it, the attachment seems strong. Durian definitely has its partisans and it appears to evoke strong reaction on either side of the fence.

According to some, the distinction is determined by region and culture. "There is a real love between Asian people and durian but there is a real hatred between westerner people and durian. Some really dislike it even if they never try it because the smell is a strong barrier," writes the author of a website called "thaiworldview."

Also on the pro durian side are some earnest but pretty darn awful poems about the fruit posted on the Durian Palace website. They read like they want to be ecstatic devotional poems, but unfortunately they remind me of work done by my less than poetically inclined middle school students: "Oh, I like them spiky fruit/They're so creamy/and they're so yummy/They feel so good/down in my tummy/Oh, I like them spiky fruit" and so forth. Come to think of it, my students' poetry is, on the whole, far, far more interesting.

Bypass the poetry and check out the rest of the Durian Palace website which is a pretty massive collection of various information related to durian.

I myself have something of a complicated relationship with this fruit. I've long been fascinated by the reaction - both positive and negative - that it is able to wrench upon the people in its presence. I have eaten it on a few occasions, and while I find it wild, unusual, extra-ordinary and an altogether moving food experience, I'm not so sure that I actually like it as much as I'd wish. I do however really enjoy talking about durian, perhaps too much, so much so that my talking once led to a durian opening ceremony in the lounge of a New England boarding school dormitory, a school where I worked for a few years. When we cracked it open, some of the kids ran away as vigorously as if they were being beared down on by wild boars.

Perhaps this piece of writing will scour the durian from my brain like a Brillo Pad. But I doubt it...

Further reading

There is a bunch of good, and not so good, durian-related reading out there. A particularly nice little piece recounts the tale of a durian-getting and eating excursion by a group of members of the science department at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City.

(The second and third photos, above, are of the durian bin at Super 88 in Allston, Massachusetts. The first photograph is of the front of a t-shirt given to me by my brother a bunch of years ago. As of yet, I haven't worn it.)