A Matter of Taste 
Forbidding Fruit 
If eaten before perfectly ripe, the persimmon 
can be a mouth-puckering experience 
by Raymond Sokolov 
The only reason anyone without a 
flat tire stops in Gnaw Bone, Indiana, 
is to visit the Brown County Sorghum 
Mill. It isn’t really a mill, just a big 
farm stand on a highway in southern 
Indiana. It opens for business only 
during the fall harvest season and sells 
the typical crops of Brown County’s 
rolling, picturesque farm country: 
pumpkins, apples, twists of bitter- 
sweet, sorghum molasses, apple but- 
ter. The mill did not have any of the 
big goose-necked gourds or the straw- 
berry popcorn, grown on tiny dark red 
ears, that I had bought at another 
stand just north of Nashville, a tourist 
center and artist’s colony that makes 
a big business out of Indiana’s log 
cabin era, with one hokey olde-time 
shoppe after another flogging folksy 
crafts and souvenirs. Gnaw Bone has 
its own specialties. 
At the Brown County Sorghum 
‘ Mill, only three miles or so from Nash- 
ville, Nancy Roberts preserves Mid- 
western homestead tradition without 
cuteness or hoopla. She makes fudge 
and candy and a cakelike “pudding” 
from the fruit of the native persimmon 
tree. Well, some days she does. But 
Mrs. Roberts also drives the Gnaw 
Bone school bus, and she has trouble 
getting persimmons, which are a tiny 
and tastier cousin of the Asian variety 
sold in supermarkets. Her usual sup- 
plier, busy with a new job in Indi- 
anapolis, hadn’t delivered any pulp 
last fall when I happened by. 
“Pulp?” I asked, inwardly cursing 
Jane and Michael Stern, whose ex- 
cellent guide to American highway 
restaurants, Roadfood, had led me to 
this remote hamlet with visions of na- 
tive persimmons dancing in my head. 
Instead, there was nary a piece of 
fudge, just talk of a pulp scarcity. 
“She used to process the fruit from 
her orchard, get rid of the skins and 
seeds, and sell me the pulp,” Mrs. 
Roberts said. But the supplier wasn’t 
home. Mrs. Roberts didn’t know where 
or on which back road she lived. At 
any rate, if I came back the next 
day, Mrs. Roberts would have a batch 
of persimmon fudge she was going 
to cook that night from some of last 
year’s pulp still left in her freezer. 
I took another tack. I checked the 
main supermarket in Nashville. No 
persimmons, at the height of the sea- 
son. Next, I dropped in at the local 
office of the U.S. Department of Ag- 
riculture’s Cooperative Extension Ser- 
vice. The woman behind the counter 
said there were no proper persimmon 
orchards in the county. Nobody cul- 
tivated persimmons. They just grew 
wild: in open places, clearings, aban- 
doned fields. You waited until after 
the first frost and then picked them 
up off the ground where they fell. 
Fruit still on the tree was too astrin- 
gent to eat. The fall had been so mild 
that the persimmons might not be 
ready yet. She told me to go look at 
a tree in her mother-in-law’s yard at 
the edge of town. 
An understandably suspicious older 
woman greeted me and pointed out 
her tree — slender, fifty feet high, with 
dark bark deeply divided into squarish 
sections. Up in the leafless branches 
I saw tiny orange fruits. The woman’s 
relatives had gathered all the fallen 
fruit the day before, and the ground 
under the tree was bare. 
At the post office, I got directions 
to the house of Mrs. Roberts’s sup- 
plier, the woman with the “orchard.” 
An hour later, after losing my way 
in a delightful labyrinth of tree-lined 
lanes, I pulled up to a desolate mobile 
home set behind a half-built house 
in the early stages of dilapidation. 
Stepping out of the car, I was attacked 
by a small mongrel, a dingy beige 
bitch who took a bite of my left ankle 
and would have taken a second helping 
if another, larger but better-behaved 
cur had not chased her away. Expect- 
ing the report of a shotgun, I waited 
a minute or two by the car. But no 
Jukes or Kallikak emerged from the 
battered trailer, so I limped across 
the field toward a scraggly stand of 
trees. A few feet from them, I slipped 
on what felt like a spot of mud. It 
was red orange and had three large 
black seeds. In the branches overhead, 
hundreds of similar persimmons dan- 
gled. And in the brown grass, strewn 
in every direction, were squishy- 
squashy ripe persimmons waiting to 
be saved from their natural predators: 
squirrels, opossums, skunks, quails, 
raccoons, and deer. 
Having liberated as many fruits as 
I could gather in my shirt, I retired 
to the safety of my vehicle. They were 
definitely the fruit of Diospyros vir- 
giniana, the American persimmon. 
Small, about the size of walnuts or 
cherry tomatoes, they resembled the 
much larger, heart-shaped oriental 
persimmon ( Diospyros kaki) only in 
color and in the gooey texture of their 
inner flesh. In flavor, these American 
persimmons far surpass their imported 
cousins. They are powerfully fragrant. 
103 
