Durian—The Real Forbidden Fruit - Brooklyn Botanic Garden (2024)

In The Malay Archipelago, famed Victorian naturalist and evolutionarytheorist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, "To eat durian is a new sensation wortha voyage to the East to experience." Roughly 150 years later, some adventurousmembers of the science department at BBG, including yours truly, decided totest his assertion.

So on a sunny June afternoon, we piled into a staff car and headed dueeast on Montgomery Street. But not for long! We soon turned right andright again and headed southwest toward Sunset Park, Brooklyn. That's becausewe knew that the Asian fruit markets there would be selling imported durian forabout a dollar a pound.

Okay, we weren't being quite as intrepid as Wallace, who spent eight yearsexploring Malaysia and Indonesia in the days before the steamboat, but we werestill on a voyage of discovery of sorts and feeling quite a rush of nervousexcitement. None of us had ever tasted durian, the so-called king of fruits.Indeed, none of us had ever seen—or smelled—one in the flesh. But wewere prepared for the worst!

The durian tree (Durio zibethius) is native to moist equatorialforests in southeast Asia. It grows to 100 feet tall and produces heavy,thick-skinned, brownish-green, soccer-ball-size fruits covered with short,sharp spikes (duri is the Malaysian word for "thorn"). When ripe, thesehedgehog-like fruits fall hard and fast to the ground—and hikers areadvised to get out the way.

Individual fruits are divided into five compartments, each containing alarge brown seed covered by a sac of thick, creamy, yellow pulp with an aromathat's legendary. You could publish a small book full of analogies that havebeen used to try to pin down this odor. Some of the more common comparisonsinclude overripe cheese, fermented onions, rotten fish, and unwashed socks.(The bad smell, of course, performs a very important function: It attractsjungle animals to the fruit to facilitate seed dispersal.)

Combine the unpleasant odor with the fruit's rich, almond-sweet flavor andpuddinglike texture, and you have a culinary experience that's been describedin one respected book on tropical crops—written, wouldn't you know, by aWesterner—as "French custard passed through a sewer." But it's anexperience that many people in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesiaappreciate and crave.

Besides eating durian raw, the inhabitants of these countries use it to makesoup, candy, pastries, and ice cream. They also eat the seeds, usually slicedand fried in oil. A traditional way of preparing durian is to cook it withsticky rice and sugar in coconut milk, which apparently helps neutralize theunpleasant pong.

Durian is a nutritious food, packed with minerals, proteins, and fats. (I'vealso read that it's prized in the East as an aphrodisiac, presumably by footfetishists.) Of course, just because these folks like to eat durian doesn'tmean that they want to breathe its fetid fumes for very long. In at least oneof these countries—Singapore—it's forbidden to carry durian on anykind of public transportation.

Deforestation has led to a decline in wild durian populations. The fruit iscultivated in orchards, and numerous varieties are available. However, becauseit takes ten years for a durian tree to come to fruition, farming hasn'texactly proliferated. Consequently, durians are becoming scarcer year by year,as well as more and more expensive.

Still, when we arrived at Sunset Park, we were perfectly willing to fork outthe big bucks for a specimen. We didn't get much help choosing a fruit from themarket attendant, who seemed just as baffled by what he was selling as we were.None of the durians on display seemed particularly outstanding, so we justpicked one and started back. We didn't notice much of an odor in the car, or ifwe did it wasn't clear whether the source was the durian or something moremundane (it was a warm day and we were all wearing socks!).

The tag on the bag told us that we'd just bought a Monthong, which is apopular durian variety grown commercially in Thailand and exported worldwide.On returning to home base, a large group of taste testers assembled in thekitchen of the Science Building to give it a try. Using a knife, we split thefruit along its natural lines of separation, pulling open the rind to revealthe yellow flesh inside.

"It's like some alien pod creature from The X-Files," someonequipped. And all of a sudden we could smell it. Onions, onions,onions...somewhat overcooked, somewhat abominable.

Plates and forks were passed around quickly, and some tentative nibblingtook place. A security guard walked 20 yards down the hall from his post toinvestigate the increasingly potent perfume.

"It tastes like it looks," volunteered one unhappy experimenter. But thatwasn't necessarily the general consensus. Yes, the durian was rathermalodorous. But some of us who held it on our tongues for a while tastedsomething sweetly strange, otherworldly, and inviting. It didn't seemimplausible, given time, and lots of cash, that we could come to love ittoo.