Dios pyros.
Persimmons are my favourite fruit. They're pretty little things: shaped variously like small tomatoes or pointed like gigantic strawberries, and an appropriately autumnal burnt orange in colour that I've always admired. Their season is brief enough that, being a fickle creature, I sometimes manage to forget them entirely. I'm often as surprised as I am pleased to see them again in the late fall. If you should be so foolish or curious as to taste one before it is ready, it will be impossibly bitter, and actually a bit numbing. It'll suck all of the moisture from your mouth, tingling in a way that is mostly, but not entirely, unpleasant, like some strange drug. I recommend trying this once, but you'll never do it again. I love persimmons because they force us to wait for them, admiring them constantly for a month or more. They won't concede to you until they're ripened to almost rotting, until you can't touch them without fear of bruising or breaking them. Then slice them into medallions. Their flesh is firm but yielding, and they're magnificent, deliriously sweet.
I fear that the season is already ending, that the three that I managed to obtain this year are the last I'll get. The first was a gift given to me at my fish counter. I shared it with two attractive young men, a butcher and a fishmonger, neither of whom had ever tasted one before. I explained the fruit while I sliced it with a clean filleting knife: it is, to my mind, at least as much a story as it is a food. I tried to share more than the slices I'd given them, an insisting Eve. But the gentlemen declined, assuring me that delicious as persimmons may be, they preferred to watch me, shamelessly gluttonous and overwhelmed with the rare pleasure. Good boys. Two of the three persimmons demand my patience still. Teasing bastards.
I fear that the season is already ending, that the three that I managed to obtain this year are the last I'll get. The first was a gift given to me at my fish counter. I shared it with two attractive young men, a butcher and a fishmonger, neither of whom had ever tasted one before. I explained the fruit while I sliced it with a clean filleting knife: it is, to my mind, at least as much a story as it is a food. I tried to share more than the slices I'd given them, an insisting Eve. But the gentlemen declined, assuring me that delicious as persimmons may be, they preferred to watch me, shamelessly gluttonous and overwhelmed with the rare pleasure. Good boys. Two of the three persimmons demand my patience still. Teasing bastards.