Persimmons

My maternal grandparents had a large backyard that stepped down into a San Diego canyon in shady tiers of fruit trees - tangerine, avocado, persimmon, plum, fig, lemon and loquat.  One of my clearest memories of my grandfather is of him lifting cardboard flats of produce out of the trunk of his sedan when he visited, or carrying them out to load into our VW van when we visited him.  Flats of avocado, apricots, tangerines for juicing, loquats, figs - my grandparents were a CSA before CSAs were a thing.

My grandfather was raised on an Iowa farm, the 3rd of 11 children.  My grandmother was a city girl, born and raised in the blossoming metropolis of San Diego, but San Diego is a place where fruit trees grow like corn and she was born to a mother who let nothing go to waste.  She was raised not amid fields but among fruit trees.

Fruit trees grew on the small property owned by my great-grandparents, and every picture of my grandmother, her parents and her sister and then later, my grandfather, mother and aunt is taken in front of a fruit tree.  In this picture of my grandmother and my mom you can see the ladder leaning up against a loquat tree that grew on my great-grandparent's property. I'm sure there was a flat of loquats on the kitchen counter, waiting to be put in the car.

Here's my gorgeous grandmother and dapper grandfather in front of the same tree.  My grandmother made the clothes you see in these photos.  I know that's what people used to do, but she was particularly good at it, as my great-grandmother was and my mother is.












I've been thrown into this nostalgia because last week I saw my colleague and mentor Ron carrying a weighty brown paper bag full of persimmons down the hall of my school.  I got all excited, like you do when you see a bag (or a cardboard flat!) of beautiful home-grown fruit, and five minutes later he came into my office cradling four of them, like an offering.

When you grow up with flats of tree fruit needing homes, you grow up learning that fruit cannot go to waste. To use up persimmons my grandma made Persimmon Cookies. They were horrible.  They were ginger-colored, fluffy, and had nuts and raisins in them.  I ate them because even as a kid I knew making persimmon cookies was one way my grandmother showed her love for us.  Also, my parents were health-conscious and I was sugar-deprived.

My grandmother was driven, and not the most gentle of women.  She returned to university when my mother and aunt were young teens and she became a high school English teacher.  It's not easy, as I know, to be a working mother or a college student and a mother.  Right now I'm all three - in grad school (again), working full time and raising two beautiful girls.  I'm similar to my grandmother in another way, too. She often had a "hard done by" mentality.  A by-product of her admirable and relentless work ethic was a bitterness, a "why can't any of you help out more?" attitude that I am often guilty of.  It's difficult to slow down and soften up when your to-do list never ends and your internal engine says "go go go."  Here were four gorgeous persimmons, begging to be used.  One more thing on my weekend's to-do list.

Yesterday, I took a good long look at the persimmon cookie recipe, lovingly encased in plastic in my grandmother's recipe box that I now own. I felt myself slipping into a sort of bad baked-good PTSD, so I put the recipe away and pulled out some cookbooks.  My 9-year old came in, highly tuned as she is to any cooking project. She wanted to help.  We all know that any project involving a 9-year old is a project that takes longer and requires more cleaning up, and I wanted to get this done and finish folding laundry.  I said, "No honey, I just want to get this baked."  She went to read in the living room, and I remembered my grandmother.

I remembered standing by the stove while she taught me to cook a skinless chicken breast with Pam - a delicious low cholesterol treat for my grandfather.  I remembered her letting us put a little Mocha Mix into our cereal to give the blue nonfat milk more opacity.  I remembered her patiently letting us squeeze mountains of tangerines into juice.  She may not have slowed down for her daughters, but she slowed down for us.  I called my daughter back into the kitchen and let her and Ruth Reichl get to work on some spice cake.

Reichl's recipe called for pumpkin and apple, but my daughter decided pureed persimmon would do just fine.  Here she's modeling the "C" grip for safe cutting she learned at school.

Pumpkin-Apple Cake suddenly became persimmon cake, and the magic of cooking turned an item on the to-do list into a memory, my daughter and I whisking eggs and scraping a perfect cup of sugar, peeking in on cakes to see if they were done.

The house smelled good.  I shoved the laundry into a corner.  It could wait.

The persimmon cake was perfect, moist, dense and spicy. We had seconds, then thirds. My mom stopped by for a visit and a slice. I sent her home with a Tupperware flat of cake.






In this way a woman's life echoes down.  She may be cranky, she may waste her time on laundry instead of the children she loves. She makes mistakes, but every once in a while the right decision is made.  Sometimes it takes a fruit one can't bear to waste to pause the endless grind, warm up the oven and put what's really important at the top of the list.