The Durian

Speaking of things that stink...

A few summers back, Ken had the idea of going on a new food adventure every weekend. Chinatown offered many items to test our taste buds, including a variety of unfamiliar produce. We ate taro root, lotus root, bitter melon (I highly recommend never putting bitter melon anywhere near your mouth), and rambutan. But nothing compared to the weirdness of the durian.

Most of you have probably seen durian for sale. It looks like this:



How many of you have actually tasted it? Are there any durian-lovers out there? It's popular in Asian cultures. Supposedly it has healing properties, and even tastes good in the right context.

But I just can't get past the smell.

On a sunny day in July, Ken decreed that this was the day we would bring home a durian. The temperature was getting up to around 30 degrees Celsius (that's 86 in American degrees). The whole Chinatown market was quite whiffy, as it always is during the summer months. The fish vendors were competing for smell dominance against overflowing garbage cans and a general, pervasive undertone of sweaty armpits.

We had heard that the durian was a smelly fruit, that it was banned on airplanes and certain other public places, but I guess we thought that the tales of its stinkiness were exaggerated. It seemed innocent enough at the fruit stall, especially compared to the place next door that had piles of dried shrimp and buckets of (mostly) live shellfish perfuming the air.

Once we had the thing in a plastic bag, we realized that it was too heavy to carry all over the market with us while we did the rest of our shopping, so we walked it back to the parking lot and left it on the backseat of the car.

An hour later, when we had finished the rest of our errands, we were ready to head home. We opened up the car, and were immediately overpowered by a strong smell of rotting garbage.

Me: OMG, what the hell IS that?

Ken: It must be the durian! Boy, does it ever stink! Geez!

We stood there with the doors open for a few minutes, trying to air out the car. It didn't help much, so we got in, rolled the windows all the way down, and drove home really, really fast.

Figuring that it was the heat that had brought out the worst of the durian's smelliforousness, we put it straight into the refrigerator as soon as we got it home. Clock-wipe transition to the next morning. I opened the fridge to get some juice, and guess what? The fridge smelled like it was packed full of rotting garbage.

Ken!

What?

If you want to eat this thing, you'd better do it right now, or I'm going to throw it off the balcony. It's stinking up the whole kitchen.

Ken wasn't willing to let the durian go without tasting it, so we sawed through the tough skin to the flesh inside. The texture wasn't any more charming than the smell. It was custardy, with strings like spaghetti squash. It didn't taste quite as bad as it smelled. It was equal parts kiwi, strawberry, and rotting garbage. Statistically, 33% trash is an improvement over 100% trash.

Once we had satisfied our curiosity, we wrapped up the rest of the durian and chucked it down the trash chute. But the story doesn't quite end there. It ends a few days later, when I was down in the basement on my way to the laundry room, and the super was bagging up all of the building's garbage to go out for collection. She had her nose wrinkled up as far as it would go. The trash room was emanating a familiar scent. The durian! It wasn't finished stinking yet.

For all I know, it's resting happily at the dump, stinking to this very day.