Bruce & Grace are visiting and, as always, I can expect things to be interesting.

Pam went with Bruce & Grace to Berkeley; the goals were to stop by Dark Carnival for some SF books, and then onto the Berkeley Bowl for some food for tonight’s garlic-laden feast.

Pam brought me home a surprise:

(Click on images for much, much larger version.)

I have said for years that I wanted to try a Durian fruit – Pam just called my bluff. Don’t handle this thing carelessly – those spines hurt and it would be a very bad idea to drop this on your foot.

The Wikipedia entry mentions the smell of the fruit – it is legendary – as:

Writing in 1856, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace provides a much-quoted description of the flavour of the durian:

A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy.[13]

Wallace cautions that “the smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable”; more recent descriptions by westerners can be more graphic. The English novelist Anthony Burgess famously said that dining on durian is like eating vanilla custard in a latrine. Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says:

... its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.[14]

It really doesn’t smell much as it is, but we’ll be opening it outside. Look for updates on the results of that experiment.

Also, Pam purchased a couple of books for me; Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson.

Yummy.