Durian

Ghetto Mr. Hunter samples another famous Singapore delicacy: the stinky durian fruit.

Mark Twain wrote about durian in Following the Equator:  

"There was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence.  It was never the season for the dorian.  It was always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other, but it never did.  By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell.  Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment.  We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture.  They said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the fruit was in your mouth, you would faint.  There is a fortune in that rind.  Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for cheese."

Singapore

August 2008