Mespilus germanica
This awkward fruit has become a fav of mine, ever since I first tried it in England a few yrs ago, for many reasons.
Obviously its taste is the first, most important reason. Getting over its appearance was not an easy task, though. It looks like a rotten apple -- when it's ready to be eaten. A fruit that's rotten before it is ripe, and is supposed to be eaten like this! I thought it'd be more than I could handle but in the end I managed.
Good, too, because it proved to be a singular experience. Something that tastes like a fruit and a nut at the same time has to be an efficient food...
Intriguing texture, unappealing appearance... and talked about in literature.
Can a fruit be more perfect and aberrant at the same time?
I often wondered why everyone and his brother go On and On Anon about peaches. OK, peaches are delicious, and juicy, and pretty, and fragrant, and cute, round, soft, velvety-- but that's easy! Like finding a kitten playing with a ball of yarn oh so cute.
Find merit in a jackfruit, like Roy. I like to think of it as Nature's chewing gum.
Or in a medlar, like Shakespeare:
MERCUTIO. If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O Romeo! that she were, O! that she were
An open et cœtera, thou a poperin pear.
OK, perhaps not the single most beautiful euphemism there ever existed-- not even Shakespeare's most subtle one, but still. The medlar is underrated, not as well-known as it should be considering how good it is, AND it has rude Elizabethan euphemisms to go with it. What more can one ask from a humble fruit?
