Persimmons

Persimmons bring to mind so many memories--not all good. When I was a very young child, the memory is a bit hazy, mom and dad brought us to someone's farm to pick persimmons. (Turns out my grandfather owned a couple and this was one of them.) Pick is probably the wrong word because, in my experience, they're a fruit that is found on the ground. As with the harvesting of any fruit, some get eaten while gathering--so I ate one. It was the nastiest, most vile tasting thing I could remember putting in my mouth up to that point but I had not yet met spinach. [As a child I absolutely hated spinach which was always served boiled.] Nothing mom said after that could convince me to eat another persimmon.

So fast forward to me as a young adult, perhaps I was in college, we would frequently go camping in Southern Missouri in the fall. While out on a walk, mom came across a grove of persimmons and tasked me and my sister to go get persimmons. She carefully described where she had been walking so we knew where to go so we grabbed a pail and set off.

You might be wondering why I would even consider gathering persimmons but I had learned that what I ate as a child was an immature fruit which is best not eaten. They are extremely bitter, due to the tanins, if they aren't ripe to the point of being squishy.

Okay, so, the funny thing about searching for persimmons is that while we knew what the fruit and seeds looked like we did not really know how to identify a tree. However, we did begin to notice a significant amount of raccoon poop with persimmon seeds and the frequency was increasing. So we were getting closer. Always good to be observant of the environment.

Eventually we came upon the grove of persimmons and begin to fill our pails. Our curiosity of the tree got us to searching one out. We located one that was loaded with fruit and, being a slender tree, I gave it a shake and persimmons rained down on us. We filled our pails in short order. We returned to the RV, emptied our pails, and went back for more.

We got a recipe from somewhere for the most delicious persimmon bread which was similar to banana bread.

The first time I saw persimmons at the grocery store I was amazed at how large they were. They were the size of tomatoes! The ones we had picked were nearly all smaller than a golf ball.

Jump forward a few years and my sister and her husband had a house built near my parents on land purchased from our great uncle. They'd been there 7-10 years when my sister tells me that she just realized there is a persimmon tree growing on the edge of the property. There are trees all along the edge of the property but neither of us had noticed that there were persimmon trees as we still don't know what they look like unless there are persimmons to be found. This occurs after the leaves have fallen off which is usually a first step in tree identification.

Putting our ignorance aside, we gathered some fruit and went through the arduous process of mashing and straining the fruit to make persimmon bread and realized we had lost the recipe--neither of us had it. This was before Google so we just sort of improvised with a banana bread recipe and were rather disappointed with the results. So much so that we haven't attempted it again.