The Vortext

So, when I said that the foodie gods had bestowed some divine luck upon me and let me see durians just sprouting from the trunk of a tree on the beach–I lied. Or, more accurately, I was mistaken. I was so excited about seeing them that I hadn’t made the effort to confirm my suspicion that they weren’t actually the infamously odoriferous and dangerously spiky and heavy fruit but rather some other Malaysian treat. They hadn’t seemed sharp enough, and that is the distinction that makes all the difference. In addition, I’d been told that they don’t usually grow out of the side of a trunk, but only in the branches. After some research, in which I came across this blog, which has terrific pictures and fair descriptions of many fruits native to Malaysia and the surrounding region, and a number of other sites that were a lot less interesting, I think I have narrowed its classification down to the jackfruit or some special local variety thereof, like the chempedak or the marang. That’s still pretty exciting, especially after looking up some facts about the jackfruit here:

Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. The exterior of the compound fruit is green or yellow when ripe. The interior consists of large edible bulbs of yellow, banana-flavored flesh that encloses a smooth, oval, light-brown seed. There may be 100 or up to 500 seeds in a single fruit, which are viable for no more than three or four days. When fully ripe, the unopened jackfruit emits a strong disagreeable odor, resembling that of decayed onions, while the pulp of the opened fruit smells of pineapple and banana.

Since it also says that the jackfruit can “appear on short, stout twigs that emerge from the trunk and large branches, or even from the soil-covered base of very old trees,” I think I have probably found my fruit.

The weirdest thing is that jackfruit and breadfruit both are distant cousins of the fig–reminds me of the taxonomical closeness of elephants and hyraxes.

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