Sunset, Monday, 28 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Clear tonight, or nearly so.

On this >1,000-acre place we inhabit as renters there are, to our knowledge, four persimmon trees, and every year we watch as the fruit ripens and taunts us with our inability to make proper use of it.

If you were to look up persimmons online, and find them, say, on a cooking website, you’d think, hey, what’s the problem, there are plenty of ways to use persimmons!

But, ironically – even though our English word ‘persimmon’ originates with the Powhatan tribe of Virginia – what most people now mean when they discuss persimmons are two Asian varieties, and these are the kind you can find in supermarkets.

In fact, ‘fresh grocer’ Tony Tantillo cautions you to be aware that there is not one, there are TWO (as if there were just two) varieties of persimmon: 

... the Fuyu, the kind you can eat right away, and the Hachiya, the kind you can’t. If you bite into an unripe Hachiya persimmon, it is as if you just drank six cups of extra strength tea. This astringent flavor is due to the high level of tannin in the fruit, and there is a good chance that you would never try a persimmon again because it tastes so bitter.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but even the Hachiya is a sweetie pie compared with the persimmons that gave persimmons their name – persimmons with virginiana in their Latin title. And these guys, these eastern, country, American persimmons, are tough to deal with.

Let’s put it this way. I’ve long been aware that you were supposed to let our persimmons go past the frost. They start out green and hard, then ripen to orange, softening, and then, after a hard frost, they turn a bit darker, even somewhat blue in places, and very soft – and then you’re supposed to be able to eat them.

I don’t think so!

‘Astringent’ doesn’t do them justice. Ever seen those joke photos of some old guy, seemingly with no teeth, his lips and mouth and cheeks so puckered up it looks like he’s swallowed them? That’s what it feels like.

I’ve tried various ways of using them, including a really interesting recipe in one of my favorite ‘old’ (1970s-era) books, still available, Putting It Up With Honey: A Natural Foods Canning and Preserving Cookbook, by Susan Geiskopf ... Geiskopf was in California when she wrote the book and I think that recipe needs one of the Asian varieties.

As for virginiana, I figured the thing to do might be to add sugar or honey and strong spices and try to make a sort of chutney. I gave up on my last attempt, before Thanksgiving, partly because of flavor failures and partly because of the two huge flat seeds that take up so much of each persimmon.

Precisely because of those unmistakable seeds, I can report one discovery I made out in the fields today. Even though persimmons are coming along rather late, and aren’t yet even entirely orange, much less soft, bears – who must possess mouths of steel (and iron constitutions) – seem to have no problem with them whatsoever.

Sunset, Sunday, 19 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Adapted from Walden, by Thoreau:

I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners you have actually eaten and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.

Guess that goes for quite a few of us.

*     *     *     *

My first real foray into my richest blackberry-picking grounds today was pretty discouraging. (While looking for blackberries, very narrowly missed stepping on some ... evidence of our local black bears.) (Sorry!) (Yes, a bear does, in the woods.)

Three factors, concerning the blackberries. The most important would be the assiduous tree- and brush-clearing carried out this winter and early spring by an outfit under contract to the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. I would like to have seen their manual or their instructions, because I got the impression that if their directive was to cut, say, every tree within 30 feet from the power lines, they liked cutting so much they decided, aw heck, let’s cut another five feet ... or why not another 10. And that included everything clear down to the ground. The third or least important factor seems to be the natural up and down cycles of different shrubs and vines in the margins of the woods. In between, at number 2 like Tom Watson, is the dismayingly conscientious job of field cutting done by the landlord’s freelance crew – the very same guys who killed me in a justifiable homicide back on June 24th. Even though I know they know their employer will never bother to go through the fields and check up on their work, they give it everything. These fellows make Yanqui myths about the Latin work ethic look really stupid.

Update on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 09:35PM by BVD

My feeling is that Thoreau sometimes doesn’t reach modern readers – and maybe this was also true for his contemporary readers – because some of his most powerful thoughts are either a bit screened or diffused in context. Sometimes little moralistic preachments or ornate curlicues distract. I had read the thought cited above three times before I really saw it.

Here’s the original paragraph:

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Not that I presume to know how it could have been done, exactly, but I would like to think that a gently edited Walden could have outsold Emerson, back in the day.