Prickly, Smelly Durian Fruit

This year the durian?those huge fruits hanging in nets at greengrocers in Chinatown that resemble a combination of giant hedgehog and armadillo?were particularly inexpensive. Most years they have cost anywhere from $6 to $10 a pound, and since they can weigh in at 10-12 pounds (and they're only sold whole, for reasons I'll explain shortly) the price is prohibitive. The crop must have been particularly good this year?in places I saw them for as little as 80 cents a pound?and on the spur of the moment one afternoon I picked up one as a sort of anti-amuse bouche for an impending bbq lunch on our terrace.

Here's the thing about durian: once opened, they smell so bad that throughout Southeast Asia, at airports, etc., there are signs of a durian fruit with a slash mark through it, similar to those pictograms for No Smoking, indicating No Durian. I had read about durian and seen them, but had no clue what I would do with one and couldn't particularly muster the enthusiasm to purchase an $80 piece of fruit that looked, at least from the outside, like a petrified trilobite of the pre-Cambrian era.

A long time ago in Sydney, Australia, I ate at one of the most fantastic restaurants in the world?Darley Street Thai. The chef/owner had trained with the chefs who cooked for the Thai royal family. It was the best Thai food I had ever eaten and murderously hot. (I have an s&m approach and theory to food?though not to other aspects of my life?in which I feel there should be a certain pain element associated with eating, and usually there is, of one sort or another.) Everything in the meal was so wonderful that although I wasn't in the least hungry anymore I decided to try one of the desserts, a durian fruit custard in coconut sauce.

Here the glories of the meal came to a halt. Imagine obtaining a bag of garbage left to ripen on the radiator, and collecting dirty underwear and filthy gym socks for a period of several weeks. Fry the assortment in onions, then pour a sweetish, highly viscous warm coconut sauce the texture of Elmer's glue over the results and one would only begin to have an approximation of the recipe. There were other aspects to this dessert as well: for days the giant quivering mass cemented to the lining of my stomach would, through some mysterious secondary fermentation process, begin to shudder and reformulate, at which time an eructation of the most foul dimension and quality would bellow up the esophageal canal, coating the palate in a distinct reminder of what had been endured. The sweaty socks, the jock strap, the fried onions, limey pigeon droppings, the spoiled milk and cod liver oil, sweet coconut gludge, not a single component was lost or forgotten. Our waiter, a charming Indonesian man, explained that durian was an acquired taste, almost addictive in nature, worth any price in the world to those admirers. Uh-huh.

Some 10 years passed during which I remembered and regretted the experience. Then a thought occurred to me: what if I treated durian (now so low in price) not as a sweet fruit but rather as a foul, oozing cheese and served it to my guests? One so wants to share memorable experiences with one's friends, after all, and in much the same way as certain pals feel obliged to regale one with, say, the story of a particularly grotesque roadside accident or hospitalization details, me too!

I purchased an assortment of really fine cheese. Camembert, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, whatever was guaranteed to stink and/or turn really runny after being left out for a few days in the hot sun, along with crackers and French bread. Many of the lunch guests were foreigners, particularly Italians and French, so a dessert of fresh fruit and fly-specked cheese would be the height of sophistication for them. Then from a man pinioned behind a display of durian in Chinatown I made my selection. "How much?" I said, pointing. He looked at me blankly. "Is this one ripe?" I said. He gave me a leering grin. "What am I supposed to do with it?" I said. "I want to serve it to guests in two days?should I refrigerate it?" Again that look of toothless intimacy. "Eight dolla," he said, hoisting the prickled, newborn-sized pod into the weighing basket. "But is it ripe?" He handed the entity over to me and pointed to a crack in its bottom I hadn't previously noticed, from which a foul odor emerged. "Yes, yes," he said. "But it's got a crack in it. I don't want one with a crack," I said petulantly. For all I knew a crack in a durian's behind was a good thing, but I wanted to appear that I knew what I was doing. So I picked out another.

All the way home lugging my creature (this one was heavier than its brother, maybe 12 pounds, really big and healthy) I kept getting a whiff of that memorable odor. I suppose it was a bit like the smell of a corpse, something one never forgets. His pointy spines kept digging into me, but I was afraid if I was too rough he might crack, which I didn't want to happen until the Day.

It was beautiful out and we sliced the fruit in half. Inside is mostly firm flesh, but there are two large pockets (now severed into lobes) containing what appears to be cranial matter surrounding a number of large brown seeds. It is this soft, brainlike stuff that is meant to be scooped out and eaten. I suppose had one never before eaten smelly cheese, this would not be a worse experience. Some of the guests were timid, almost tearful; other gamely, boldly dug in, forging ahead while blithely talking about their experiences in Thailand and Indonesia, where I knew damn well they had probably never tried the stuff. Clouds of flies began to gather. Honestly, it was just like a kind of previously undiscovered cheese, something with the consistency of warm uncooked brains as eaten by female members of a New Guinea tribe in search of protein before cannibalism was outlawed. My husband particularly liked it, but he is English and eats Marmite.

Although there were many guests who did go back for seconds, after the party there was still one whole half of baby. As best I could I sealed it in plastic and forced it into the refrigerator. "What the hell did you do?" Tim said in horror, later. "You didn't keep it, did you?"

"I thought...uh, I thought you liked it. I thought it was so brilliant, the way I treated it like a savory, rather than a sweet."

"I did like it...but that doesn't mean I'm planning to eat it again. Everything in the refrigerator smells like it now?even the ice cubes are durian-flavored."

I understood then it was as much the olfactory qualities of durian as the taste. The odor molecules must have some clever method of attaching themselves to one's nose hairs, to the degree where one becomes deranged, like a moose tormented by mosquitoes. It was a really great conversation topic, though, and I'm thinking, the next time there's a prodigious crop and the price goes down, I'm going to have another postprandial durian event, only this time offering Vick's Vap-O-Rub to the guests first, to smear under their noses, like they do in those pathologists' labs.