Persimmons, Roasted or Stuffed in Delicata Squash

It surprised me to discover that persimmons perform spectacularly in the oven, turning all maple-custardy inside. Last week I roasted some fuyu persimmons, red onions, and brussels sprouts, and took them to the Obama potluck garnished with toasted walnuts and drizzled with maple syrup. I was so happy when Virginia and Indiana were colored blue on the map -- both states in which I have registered to vote, but never thought it would matter. Obama hangs out with Alice Waters, said the farmer Waters shops from.

San Francisco erupted into spontaneous street parties. I biked between joyfully honking cars on Market Street, and threaded my way through the crowds on Castro, where a bit of anxiety tempered everyone's glee. California's Proposition 8 passed. What a piece of hate-legislation it is: using the state constitution to tell some people they can't marry.

Tonight I spooned super-ripe peeled fuyu persimmons into delicata halves with minced shallots, raisins, and butter, and baked them up till quite tender at 425. And then I had cornbread crumbled in my lentil soup. I made Sally Fallon's yogurt-fermented cornbread from Nourishing Traditions, which was light, gold-crusted, nubbly, and deeply corn-y.

To roast persimmons: select ripe-orange, almost-tender fuyu persimmons. Rinse them and pluck out their gorgeously symmetric leaf-tops with your thumb. Slice them in eighths and pick out any pits. Arrange them on a buttered baking sheet, sprinkle with salt, and roast at 400 till golden on the underside -- twenty minutes or so -- and flip them. Continue baking till uniformly golden, crisp on the outside and very tender on the inside. Toss with other roasted or cooked vegetables, or eat plain with butter.

U-Eat

While I have my camera and shoes, my USB cord seems to be in the same buried box as my clean socks. No pictures, then of my U-Haul manna. My traveling companion brought the finest food in the cab: a perfect persimmon and a brined beef tongue. I brought the random things I hoped my housemates wouldn't miss (yes, I'm the scape- goat cheese, my dears). Altogether, then, I made the journey from Portland to San Francisco with half a persimmon, all 7 ounces of cheese, a square of Theo's Ghana chocolate, 3 bosc pears (one brown and mealy), two slices beef tongue, half an orange, and one baby banana. I consumed approximately 300% of my recommended daily saturated fat, while my fifth of the shared U-Haul guzzled a billion percent of its recommended daily non-renewable oil. The cats refused all apologies, palliatives, and palatables.

Persimmon Pudding

It's unrepentantly old-fashioned, free-standing, and decadent as only the last loyal citizen of a crumbling empire can be.  Think "pudding" as in "bread pudding": what seems mere cake at first slice turns all syrupy-spicy-custardy under a generous lather of cream and then disappears to leave you dazed and dreamy-eyed, not unlike T. Ellsworth when The Girl went back to her fiance in Mexico.  

I adapted this recipe somewhat arbitrarily based on the large units in which I had frozen my persimmon pulp. Having nearly a quart of persimmon on hand, I reduced the milk and splashed in all my silky red-orange pulp with wantonly intemperate glee. A certain prodigality was due if we were to forget the threat of barbarian invasion (winter strawberries) for one gloriously debauched night of persimmon indulgence.  Incidentally, the sun never sets on the persimmon empire, since persimmons are native to all four hemispheres.

In the end, my recipe looked like this:

Preheat the oven to 325.  Melt 6 tablespoons butter in the warming oven. Mix together 3.5 cups hachiya persimmon pulp, 1/4 c. cream, 1/2 c. whole milk, 2 tablespoons honey, 3 tablespoons maple syrup, a splash of vanilla, and 3 eggs. Pull the butter from the oven when it's melted to let it cool a bit, but no harm done if it gets a chance to brown a little.

In another bowl, whisk together 1.5 c. flour, 3/4 tsp. baking powder, 3/4 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1.5 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg and 1 tsp. salt.  Add the wets to the dries and combine well.  Let stand while you finish up.

Butter your large springform pan and lightly toast 2/3 c. walnuts.  Break up the walnuts and add them to the batter, along with 1/3 c. raisins and the slightly-cooled butter.  Pour the batter into the pan and slide it into the oven with a baking sheet underneath to catch any drips.  Bake 45 minutes.  If you have to run out suddenly at this point to move your cats to fresher pastures, just turn off the oven and leave it till your return.  The pudding should rise in the center and form deep glassy rifts while still quivering in invitation.

Serve with pillows of whipped cream: whisk 1.5 c. heavy whipping cream, 1/4 c. maple syrup, and 1 tsp. vanilla till almost stiff shortly before serving.

Persimmons

Tell me.  How come folks pay more for a quart of atrophied white-shouldered, moldy-assed, ungainly Californicating strawberries than a voluptuous hachiya persimmon?  Honestly! Strawberries in December give you that same queasy feeling as peaking at your presents under the tree (to employ an in-season metaphor).  They're like porn when the girl next door is home alone doing the Sunday crossword in her lingerie.

Because a ripe persimmon is a skinful of quivering pumpkin-apricot jelly.  It's translucent like amber, and'll give you googly eyes, and persists in dangling from denuded branches long into the winter, long after the leaves have fallen, and the snow, too.  The persimmon was meant to make the autumn not just bearable, but exquisite: a study in the beauty of orange on grey, of sweetness in the rain, and something that could be called patience but is far too delicious to be so didactic. For some reason, we can't wait till May for our strawberries, and insist on eating the botox-flavored, injection-molded pretend strawberries they assemble in sunnier regions and ship north on tractor-trailers in December.

Of course I love strawberries!  In May I frolic, I cavort, I gambol for my ruby-hearted strawberries.  I dance all night and fall in love and make shortcake.  Come December, though, I get wise and wrinkly and nibble (gobble, suck, slurp?) those sunny plump persimmons.  And puzzle over 9 across.

Really.  Tell me how they choke those strawberries down.