the.com/persimmon
A fruit that punishes impatience with a mouthful of cotton, rewards waiting with honey.
means A sweet orange-red fruit borne on certain trees, famously mouth-drying when unripe and lusciously soft when fully mature.
from From the Powhatan word 'pasimenan,' meaning roughly 'dried fruit,' picked up by English settlers in early Virginia. The native peoples dried the fruit to tame its astringency, and that practical detail rode along into the name — a small linguistic souvenir of the Algonquian-speaking world the colonists stepped into.
- unripe trap
- Tannins literally pucker your mouth into chalk
- name origin
- From Algonquian 'putchamin,' a dried-fruit word
- two types
- Astringent versus non-astringent decides everything
- frozen trick
- Freezing breaks tannins, fakes ripeness fast
- ancient crop
- Cultivated in China over 2,000 years
fuyu persimmon — japanese cultivar, non-astringent variety widely grown in california and asia since 1960s
hachiya persimmon — japanese astringent variety requiring ripening, dominant commercial type in north america
sharon fruit — israeli seedless persimmon trademarked variety developed in sharon plain region