At the poolside cafe at our hotel in Chiang Rai, Thailand, the kids stared goggle-eyed at a freezer full of ice cream. They dug through the durian ice cream pops. Naturally, of course, they chose something on a stick: crispy wafer, covered in chocolate.
But let’s back up. I should explain.
”The durian is the fruit that would make the devil either drool or retreat.”
What is durian?
The durian is the fruit that would make the devil either drool or retreat.
The massive durian fruit is a foot long, 6 inches in diameter, and can weigh seven pounds. The inedible skin of the durian is also covered in short spikes, as if a mango and a hedgehog had an armored mace of a baby. (It could prove handy in a bar fight.)
Inside, yellow, fleshy pods lay nestled amid white pith, as if they’d been packed with loving care in wool.
Back to our poolside cafe in Chiang Rai, Thailand
After the kids picked out their treats, I chose something: A coconut milk and durian ice cream bar on a stick.
A friend once described durian to me as “eating a deliciously soft custard while sitting on the toilet.”
Many people in Southeast Asia have a love-hate relationship with durian. The fruit turns up in many products, and is found throughout the region. Yet durian is also possibly the record-holder for fruit most depicted in prohibition signs.
Unaccompanied smoking durian
If you go to a subway in Southeast Asia, circle-and-slash signs will remind you that durian is not allowed in subway cars or stations. We rode in hired cars that had “no durian” signs on the back of the seats.
In the elevator in our Chiang Rai hotel, Connor took to saying he was “going to be an unaccompanied smoking durian,” owing to the three signs on the elevator that warned us that unaccompanied children, smoking, and durian were not allowed.
The big try of icy cold durian ice cream
While I’d been to Asia previously, I had not tried durian. So, as Connor and Aster sat back at our poolside table and unwrapped their ice creams, Jodie grinned in surprise as I unwrapped ours.
And then we ate our durian ice cream.
The taste was sweet, with a custard-ish quality, and a tropical note that reminded me of mango. However, it was mango and custard, as if you had also, say in a fit of madness posing as inspiration, dumped in an entire, finely minced red onion.
A sulfurous aftermath
For the rest of the afternoon, Jodie and I burped up so much sulphur, volcanoes along the Ring of Fire waged a letter-writing campaign demanding that we stop giving them a bad name.
One of us would cringe, clutch our heart, and wait for the minor eruption to pass. And pass it did. Yet it would linger, a funk in the mouth that refused eviction. Then we would grimace and find something to drink, desperate to dispel the durian from our mouths, our souls, our memories.
Perhaps, in time, durian is a taste I could acquire. We travel to try things, to learn and to make. But sometimes what you learn, is that once is enough.
