Kakis and the Collection Thereof
Today, I decided, was a day ripe for early afternoon adventures. It was mostly sunny, and pleasantly cool, with a decided scent of fall in the air, and I hadn’t gone on an extended wandering for quite a while. And so, armed with a light sweater, my camera, and a bit of change in my pocket, I headed out to explore.
My first look at the kaki tree.
On the way, I bought one of my favourite chocolates at the chocolatier’s near my house (I’ll be making a post about them sometime soon), and so, happily nibbling, I made my way down towards St. Etienne, my favourite church (another future post). After wandering through the courtyard, I decided I was going to head down to the Grand Rond and the Jardin des Plantes, two large public parks just south of where I live. All was uneventful, save for the occasional photo opportunity, until I arrived in the Jardin des Plantes and was brought up short by the presence of a strange fruit-bearing tree.
These fruits, I thought at first, were peaches, but the longer I stared at them the more convinced I became that this was not quite right. There didn’t seem to be any on the ground, however, and the lowest branch was too high to hoist myself up onto, so at first I thought my curiosity would go unsatisfied. But while I contemplated the tree in perplexed confusion, a little old man, barely five feet tall, arrived with a rather dauntingly long stick, which he immediately began using to attempt to knock these fruits out of the tree. However, his stick was too crooked and too heavy, and he soon gave up, breaking it to pieces and throwing it in the bushes.
After a brief conversation with him, and a woman passing by, I learned that these fruits are called kakis in both French and Italian, but this led me no closer to discovering what they were in English. Determined to get one down, I set off around the park in the direction of what they said was another kaki tree in hopes that I would be able to climb this one and get one of the mysterious fruits down. In his, however, I was unsuccessful – this tree, like the other, had no branches low enough to climb onto. I spent a while balanced on the back of a park bench, shaking one of the lower branches in hopes of freeing one of the kakis, but to no avail. Still not willing to give up, I headed back to the first tree, where I discovered both the woman and the little old man had disappeared.
The construction of the kaki collecting stick.
Undaunted, I went looking in the bushes to find the pieces of the stick the old man had dropped there. I broke them into shorter pieces and amused myself lobbing them at the tree in hopes of knocking down a fruit or two to take home, but in this pursuit I was once again, quite literally, fruitless. However, amidst the amused passers-by, there was a ray of hope. The little old man had returned, this time carrying two shorter, lighter, and mostly straight sticks, which he then proceeded to bind together with three lengths of twine he apparently just happened to have in his pocket. Then, with what can only be described as the ease of long practice, he immediately set to work, using the little fork on the end of the stick to twist several kakis off the stem and down to the ground. I was awarded with two of them.
The kaki collecting stick in action.
I was told not to worry about the bruising on them, and to take them home and put them in my kitchen, sitting them on their stems, where I was to check on them every day. When they were soft, he said, they would be ready to be eaten, and they were not eaten in stews or as a cooked vegetable as I initially guessed – their texture is something like peppers, and the interiors of the few broken pieces I managed to find seemed somewhat pepper-like to me as well. No, I was told, they are fruits, which one eats raw, but only once they become soft, as before then they are not desirable. And so, now armed with two kakis and this newfound knowledge as well as everything else, I thanked him and went on my way, returning home in short order, where I washed the kakis, related the entire story to my mother, and put them on the counter, stems down, as I had been told.
One of the newly harvested kakis.
So did I ever discover what kakis actually are? Yes, in fact. While I finished washing them off, mom went to check the computer, whereupon we discovered that the kaki is a Japanese fruit that has spread across Europe and Asia, related to a fruit that grows right at home, in the northern United States.
What is it?
A persimmon.