Durian Fruit is like Hell in Your Mouth

Roz brought me a treat home the other day. In the staff room she found a bag of Durian fruit candy, seemingly opened and immediately discarded. Now, we’d already come across the durian fruit a few days before, reading about it in a cook book. But before I go into that, here’s the little candy, innocent and alluring:

The cook book describes the fruit as

having a custardy flavour, but with an unpleasant smell.

Obviously a taste adventure like this would be impossible to resist, so I popped it on my tongue, tentatively, letting the flavour establish itself before I committed to the whole thing. Let me quote from Wikipedia here:

.. 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. (via)

The flavours I got were:

• onion
• whatever natural gas might taste like if it tasted like the odour they add to it
• pure, undistilled evil

Apparently this fruit is notorious for it’s bad smell, to the point where it is actually banned in some public places. And it’s not just the smell that can be lethal:

A durian falling on a person’s head can cause serious injuries or death because it is heavy and armed with sharp thorns, and may fall from a significant height, so wearing a hardhat is recommended when collecting the fruit. For this reason the durian is sometimes called the most dangerous fruit in the world, along with its name in Vietnamese, sầu riêng, meaning “private sorrow”. (via)

Private sorrow pretty much sums up the state I was in after getting involved with that candy.

Oh, and P.S.:

Durian is not recommended for consuming with alcoholic beverages, as the combination of natural substances is a powerful producer of internal gas. (via)