I saw this Karl Middlebrooks piece on durian at Medium yesterday, The Cake That Should Not Be. His discussion of the fruit was not exactly tempting.
Everything I’ve heard about this fruit is that it smells awful. So awful, in fact, that in some places in Southeast Asia, you can’t bring them on public transportation or into restaurants and bars.
Still, people eat it. I was surprised to see a confirming piece in The New York Times today, A Love Letter to a Smelly Fruit. The accompanying video is too good to miss.
I Iove that Thomas Fuller compares the breeding of durian fruit to the breeding of flavorless hothouse tomatoes, and that he convincingly manages to work a William Blake quotation into an appreciation of a fruit that still seems unattractive to me: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.