fun story: most of my experience with durians comes from the game Don’t Starve, where durians a) are monster food and b) negatively impact your sanity. the best use for them is either to just let them rot, or use them as part of a fruit salad. anything else runs the risk of turning your meal into monster lasagna
Needfuldoer
Is it anything like green onion dip made with sour cream?
Reltzik
…. MAYBE caramelized onions could work?
Hellespont
Durians are delicious. Now lychee, they are dark balls of mucus.
They give you a whole extra heart, of course they’re tasty!
Meta
I’ve got some simmered fruit in my inventory that gives me twenty extra hearts. Shoutout to the durian.
SeanC
I guess it’s either genetic or cultural taste, which basically means “idk try some and see if you like it?” As a southeast Asian who grew up eating it like once a year, it would seem to me that most folks who thinks it ABSOLUTELY nasty would probably find that it tastes nasty, because to me durians smell amazing. Although there are people who likes the taste despite the smell.
On my own experiences: There this distinct, indescribable cocktail of flavours that makes the “right” Durian taste, some creaminess, slight sweetness, very slight sharpness. Now, I’ve had some HORRIBLE durians where that raw-onion sharpness just pervades the whole taste, and it feels like eating plastic (I don’t know if it was ACTUALLY bad because everyone else ate it fine, and I was the only one gagging).
Thinking again, this was shortly after I had a durian feast because someone’s aunt has some durian trees on their back yard and were VERY eager to provide for her visiting guests. I guess it’s either I just got exposed to very good, homegrown durians and became a durian-snob and the widely available ones became Lesser, or that my body is Literally Done With Durians Forever after eating so much of it in one sitting.
vlademir1
Just going to massively respond to everything on my screen from this thread at once, it’ll save time.
@Maxyai While I agree with them having some elements reminiscent of the Allium genus, though my own experience has been more toward minor garlic or shallot tones than onion, I’d debate “yogurt” and instead suggest “custard” with even some of the sulfuresque eggy elements coming to bear. Of course my own experience is very limited *shrugs*.
@Hellespont Yeah, lychee is one I will never understand the appeal of on a texture level.
@Pablo360 It’s not just that taste is subjective. Different specimens of the exact same thing (say two durians taken from the same plant for example) can be near completely different based from all sorts of variables and their complex interactions and that’s before you add in the physiological variations between two different people tasting them and then you have the psychological aspects involved in taste subjectively changing how each perceives that taste. Put short, it’s not just the subjectivity of taste but the complexity as well.
Halpful
The lychees I’ve eaten don’t have that texture. they’re more the texture of grapes iirc. maybe slightly rubbery grapes if the quality is low.
Egg
Yeah, what the hell? Lychee is practically *crisp*.
Andrew_C
Dunno, Lychees always seemed extremely rubbery to me. Like you could play squash with them
Jason
Grape isn’t a bad comparison from my experience. But denser. I love lychees, haven’t had them in AGES. When I try to put them into fruit salad they don’t make it that far.
The reason is because some poor scribe wrote the latin word for “apple” instead of “evil” circa 600 AD/CE, which is actually an easy mistake given that the words in question were “melus” and “malus”, they sound very similar Medieval Latin, and easpecially in Anglo-Saxon England it was often times very hard to tell whether one was supposed to use an “a” or an “e” because Old English is confusing as hell.
Makes no sense to be an apple anyway, apples didn’t grow in the Middle East.
In Hebrew, it’s just “fruit”. Common interpretations are pomegranates (associated with fertility and female sexuality), or figs (since they covered their nakedness with fig leaves, it would kinda make sense to be standing at a fig tree).
Arianod
It made sense for people in Europe to assume that the Forbidden Fruit was an apple anyway; apples are traditionally connected to death, godhood, and the other world in European mythos.
Leorale
Ooh. That makes the poisoned apple in fairytales way cooler, too.
DaveM
In at least one early version of Snow White, the poisoned apple is a “love apple” or tomato! In medieval Europe the tomato was thought to be closely related to deadly nightshade, and so it’s fruit had to be exceedingly poisonous. Fortunately, this myth faded, imagine European (or Italian) cuisine without the humble tomato. The horror, the horror…
chief_of_staves
Technically speaking, they weren’t wrong about the relation. Tomatoes, potatos and peppers are the edible members of the otherwise very dangerous nightshade or solanaceae family of plants. All the edible solanums are from the Americas, not just tomatos. So Italy didn’t start out with tomato any more than Ireland did with potatos.
what i heard is that the reason why it was considered poisonous is because when you eat tomato on a pewter dish (which is what most dishes at the time were made out of), the acids react badly and it becomes poisonous. when we started to move away from pewter then it stopped being poisonous, lmao
Vampire Chipmunk
Also, for whatever reason, a lot of people way back when used “apple” to just mean “fruit”. Sort of like how in some areas of the South use “coke” to mean any kind of soda. (Fun fact, that’s how we got “pineapple,” it used to be an alternate way of saying pine cone and then someone thought this new fruit looked like a pine cone.)
Delicious Taffy
Who are these Coke blasphemers? I’ll ruin their economy, I swear it.
Deanatay
Similar idea behind the word ‘corn’. ‘Corn’ used to be a general word for any grain, not specifically to the American grain. Teosinte, or Maize, was referred to as ‘Indian corn’ by Western settlers, and eventually the ‘Indian’ was dropped.
It was then rapidly forced into nearly every fucking dish anyone has ever cooked in the American Midwest. I kid you not, I’ve seen corn in goddamn spaghetti. There’s so fucking much of it here, we’re piling it into dishes it doesn’t belong in, just to get rid of it.
thejeff
Could be worse. Could be zuchinni.
You don’t even need to farm it, you get swamped by just a backyard garden.
There’s a joke common in rural Massachusetts about a city slicker who comes up to visit and is told to be sure to lock his car. He asks if they have trouble with car thieves in the nice small town: “Oh no. It’s worse. They’ll leave zucchini in it.”
Only ever had zucchini in bread or fried. Fuckin’ Illinois, by the way, frying everything or turning it into bread… Is it actually worth eating in any other form?
With respect, that sounds like folk etymology. Particularly since ‘evil’ doesn’t make sense in that context, assuming I’m getting the context right. Do you have a reference for this?
Ok, just got out my old Latin dictionary (I took it in high school) and it turns out both evil and apple are “malum” in the singular nominative case, making such a screw up even more likely.
Inspector Hound
I’m not disputing that they have similar-to-identical spellings. I’m disputing that translating to ‘apple’ was an error and they really meant ‘evil’. Again, contextually, it doesn’t make sense.
StClair
Many scribes were not what you would technically call “literate.”
Compare also the modern “would of”, which makes absolutely no grammatical sense but sounds like an actual, correct phrase…
What is “umami”, even? I’ve seen it used as a replacement for “savory”, but then why not just say that? The only consistent example I’ve found for what the hell “umami” is supposed to describe, is tomatoes, especially ketchup.
THEHYPERBOLOID
How about a sugar cane to chew on?
Bruceski
peaches at that perfect point where they’re not rock hard but haven’t gone squichy yet.
Bruceski
Or cherries during the cheap season. At least round here they can be 2 bucks a pound one week and 8 bucks a pound the next while Raniers (oh God Raniers!) have dropped to 3 for some reason. It all depends on when things harvest.
Dellaran
I got a couple pounds of cherries last night at $2/pound. Haven’t seen Rainiers yet though.
I was so turned off by artificial cherry flavor when I was younger, it took me a long time to discover how amazing real cherries are.
Bruceski
Yeah, I don’t think Raniers are out yet. Just remembering from other years. Most of the time they’re much more expensive than normal cherries, and when you taste one you realize why.
every so often I buy some fruit, then I don’t have the spoons to chop it up or something, and so it ends up in the compost.
except the dates; once the bag is reachable from the computer, it doesn’t last long. I wish I could buy a bag of pre-cut/washed fresh fruit that wasn’t 90% weird melon stuff. I guess there’s canned fruit, but does that still have much vitamins?
Frozen is probably better, and can be a much cheaper way of getting berries.
Halpful
it irreparably changes the texture, though, so then you have to blend or cook them. I can’t talk myself into putting in that effort unless I’ve got so many spoons I can make pancakes.
I just end up eating Dirty Unwashed Fruit
I mean you don’t really need to slice anything except melons
or oranges
or any citruses
but I mean bananas can be opened in 10 seconds and apples and pears are just eaten the way they are and berries you just have to spit out the core for some of them but others you can literally just grab and eat by a mouthful…
ah waiting for the season when they are not horribly expensive ;~;
(other than apples and bananas. those are a year-round treat)
If it were up to me (ie: I was making all the grocery decisions, and could afford it), there’d always be Clementines in the fridge (also, banana slices and strawberries in the freezer).
426 thoughts on “Apples”
Ana Chronistic
they’re forbidden anyway
or was that figs
myeh
zoelogical
it’s whatever symbolic fruit we most dislike at the moment
so durians
Pablo360
But durians are symbolic of Steven Universe
zoelogical
ho shit, symbolism misnavigated!!!
mostly i was going with they are big and smelly and delicious on the inside
maxyai
You managed to find a tasty durian? They taste like onion yogurt.
zoelogical
i heard they were tasty????
i d k
Pablo360
It’s not like taste is subjective or anything
desolation0
Yeah, some people may like the taste of onion yogurt.
zoelogical
fun story: most of my experience with durians comes from the game Don’t Starve, where durians a) are monster food and b) negatively impact your sanity. the best use for them is either to just let them rot, or use them as part of a fruit salad. anything else runs the risk of turning your meal into monster lasagna
Needfuldoer
Is it anything like green onion dip made with sour cream?
Reltzik
…. MAYBE caramelized onions could work?
Hellespont
Durians are delicious. Now lychee, they are dark balls of mucus.
Fart Captor
They give you a whole extra heart, of course they’re tasty!
Meta
I’ve got some simmered fruit in my inventory that gives me twenty extra hearts. Shoutout to the durian.
SeanC
I guess it’s either genetic or cultural taste, which basically means “idk try some and see if you like it?” As a southeast Asian who grew up eating it like once a year, it would seem to me that most folks who thinks it ABSOLUTELY nasty would probably find that it tastes nasty, because to me durians smell amazing. Although there are people who likes the taste despite the smell.
On my own experiences: There this distinct, indescribable cocktail of flavours that makes the “right” Durian taste, some creaminess, slight sweetness, very slight sharpness. Now, I’ve had some HORRIBLE durians where that raw-onion sharpness just pervades the whole taste, and it feels like eating plastic (I don’t know if it was ACTUALLY bad because everyone else ate it fine, and I was the only one gagging).
Thinking again, this was shortly after I had a durian feast because someone’s aunt has some durian trees on their back yard and were VERY eager to provide for her visiting guests. I guess it’s either I just got exposed to very good, homegrown durians and became a durian-snob and the widely available ones became Lesser, or that my body is Literally Done With Durians Forever after eating so much of it in one sitting.
vlademir1
Just going to massively respond to everything on my screen from this thread at once, it’ll save time.
@Maxyai While I agree with them having some elements reminiscent of the Allium genus, though my own experience has been more toward minor garlic or shallot tones than onion, I’d debate “yogurt” and instead suggest “custard” with even some of the sulfuresque eggy elements coming to bear. Of course my own experience is very limited *shrugs*.
@Hellespont Yeah, lychee is one I will never understand the appeal of on a texture level.
@Pablo360 It’s not just that taste is subjective. Different specimens of the exact same thing (say two durians taken from the same plant for example) can be near completely different based from all sorts of variables and their complex interactions and that’s before you add in the physiological variations between two different people tasting them and then you have the psychological aspects involved in taste subjectively changing how each perceives that taste. Put short, it’s not just the subjectivity of taste but the complexity as well.
Halpful
The lychees I’ve eaten don’t have that texture. they’re more the texture of grapes iirc. maybe slightly rubbery grapes if the quality is low.
Egg
Yeah, what the hell? Lychee is practically *crisp*.
Andrew_C
Dunno, Lychees always seemed extremely rubbery to me. Like you could play squash with them
Jason
Grape isn’t a bad comparison from my experience. But denser. I love lychees, haven’t had them in AGES. When I try to put them into fruit salad they don’t make it that far.
JessWitt
I thought that was ube now?
Pablo360
wynaut both
butts
yams aren’t fruit
JessWitt
Just the symbolic food, not symbolic fruit.
Pablo360
Not with that attitude they aren’t
zoomer296
Cavendish bananas can go take a hike, the flavorless fucks.
I want Gros Michel bananas back.
onetwoduck
Genital jokes abound
Reltzik
But half of those jokes flop.
JessWitt
One source says it’s pomegranates.
Pablo360
Would that source be Persephone by any chance
Bagge
Apples are jerks to Becky anyway
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/darling/
Rukduk
The reason is because some poor scribe wrote the latin word for “apple” instead of “evil” circa 600 AD/CE, which is actually an easy mistake given that the words in question were “melus” and “malus”, they sound very similar Medieval Latin, and easpecially in Anglo-Saxon England it was often times very hard to tell whether one was supposed to use an “a” or an “e” because Old English is confusing as hell.
Leorale
Neat!
Makes no sense to be an apple anyway, apples didn’t grow in the Middle East.
In Hebrew, it’s just “fruit”. Common interpretations are pomegranates (associated with fertility and female sexuality), or figs (since they covered their nakedness with fig leaves, it would kinda make sense to be standing at a fig tree).
Arianod
It made sense for people in Europe to assume that the Forbidden Fruit was an apple anyway; apples are traditionally connected to death, godhood, and the other world in European mythos.
Leorale
Ooh. That makes the poisoned apple in fairytales way cooler, too.
DaveM
In at least one early version of Snow White, the poisoned apple is a “love apple” or tomato! In medieval Europe the tomato was thought to be closely related to deadly nightshade, and so it’s fruit had to be exceedingly poisonous. Fortunately, this myth faded, imagine European (or Italian) cuisine without the humble tomato. The horror, the horror…
chief_of_staves
Technically speaking, they weren’t wrong about the relation. Tomatoes, potatos and peppers are the edible members of the otherwise very dangerous nightshade or solanaceae family of plants. All the edible solanums are from the Americas, not just tomatos. So Italy didn’t start out with tomato any more than Ireland did with potatos.
zoelogical
what i heard is that the reason why it was considered poisonous is because when you eat tomato on a pewter dish (which is what most dishes at the time were made out of), the acids react badly and it becomes poisonous. when we started to move away from pewter then it stopped being poisonous, lmao
Vampire Chipmunk
Also, for whatever reason, a lot of people way back when used “apple” to just mean “fruit”. Sort of like how in some areas of the South use “coke” to mean any kind of soda. (Fun fact, that’s how we got “pineapple,” it used to be an alternate way of saying pine cone and then someone thought this new fruit looked like a pine cone.)
Delicious Taffy
Who are these Coke blasphemers? I’ll ruin their economy, I swear it.
Deanatay
Similar idea behind the word ‘corn’. ‘Corn’ used to be a general word for any grain, not specifically to the American grain. Teosinte, or Maize, was referred to as ‘Indian corn’ by Western settlers, and eventually the ‘Indian’ was dropped.
http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-word-corn
Delicious Taffy
It was then rapidly forced into nearly every fucking dish anyone has ever cooked in the American Midwest. I kid you not, I’ve seen corn in goddamn spaghetti. There’s so fucking much of it here, we’re piling it into dishes it doesn’t belong in, just to get rid of it.
thejeff
Could be worse. Could be zuchinni.
You don’t even need to farm it, you get swamped by just a backyard garden.
There’s a joke common in rural Massachusetts about a city slicker who comes up to visit and is told to be sure to lock his car. He asks if they have trouble with car thieves in the nice small town: “Oh no. It’s worse. They’ll leave zucchini in it.”
Delicious Taffy
Only ever had zucchini in bread or fried. Fuckin’ Illinois, by the way, frying everything or turning it into bread… Is it actually worth eating in any other form?
Inspector Hound
With respect, that sounds like folk etymology. Particularly since ‘evil’ doesn’t make sense in that context, assuming I’m getting the context right. Do you have a reference for this?
(Trying very hard not to say ‘citation needed’…)
Rukduk
Ok, just got out my old Latin dictionary (I took it in high school) and it turns out both evil and apple are “malum” in the singular nominative case, making such a screw up even more likely.
Inspector Hound
I’m not disputing that they have similar-to-identical spellings. I’m disputing that translating to ‘apple’ was an error and they really meant ‘evil’. Again, contextually, it doesn’t make sense.
StClair
Many scribes were not what you would technically call “literate.”
Compare also the modern “would of”, which makes absolutely no grammatical sense but sounds like an actual, correct phrase…
ProfessorDetective
I thought it was pomegranates.
Mr. Mendo
Yeah, I basically never buy fruit. Not that I don’t like fruit, I just never do. #adulting
zoelogical
i love fruit
one time i was at college and was feeding myself poorly and bought a carton of strawberries
and they were so delicious i cried
Mr. Mendo
There is nothing in life sweeter than a fresh bunch of grapes!
Pablo360
Except a barrel of puppies
Or a barrel of pure cane sugar
zoelogical
a carton of blueberries with sugar sprinkled on top
Mr. Mendo
I think in this instance we’d need some brown sugar. Vary up the flavor palette a little! 😉
Some1
Or a barrel of thaumatin
Reltzik
Puppies are more salty / umami.
….
…. or so I would imagine.
….
*flees*
Delicious Taffy
What is “umami”, even? I’ve seen it used as a replacement for “savory”, but then why not just say that? The only consistent example I’ve found for what the hell “umami” is supposed to describe, is tomatoes, especially ketchup.
THEHYPERBOLOID
How about a sugar cane to chew on?
Bruceski
peaches at that perfect point where they’re not rock hard but haven’t gone squichy yet.
Bruceski
Or cherries during the cheap season. At least round here they can be 2 bucks a pound one week and 8 bucks a pound the next while Raniers (oh God Raniers!) have dropped to 3 for some reason. It all depends on when things harvest.
Dellaran
I got a couple pounds of cherries last night at $2/pound. Haven’t seen Rainiers yet though.
I was so turned off by artificial cherry flavor when I was younger, it took me a long time to discover how amazing real cherries are.
Bruceski
Yeah, I don’t think Raniers are out yet. Just remembering from other years. Most of the time they’re much more expensive than normal cherries, and when you taste one you realize why.
C.T Phipps
The idea of fruit being adult is a bizarre bizarre thing to me. Fruit is sweet and good.
Mr. Mendo
Probably because it’s in the part of the supermarket where none of the food has a free toy inside!
desolation0
We need more free toys with our fruit
MatsuoTanuki
You can play gatling gun with a mouthful of watermelon seeds, does that count?
Halpful
every so often I buy some fruit, then I don’t have the spoons to chop it up or something, and so it ends up in the compost.
except the dates; once the bag is reachable from the computer, it doesn’t last long. I wish I could buy a bag of pre-cut/washed fresh fruit that wasn’t 90% weird melon stuff. I guess there’s canned fruit, but does that still have much vitamins?
drs
Frozen is probably better, and can be a much cheaper way of getting berries.
Halpful
it irreparably changes the texture, though, so then you have to blend or cook them. I can’t talk myself into putting in that effort unless I’ve got so many spoons I can make pancakes.
Liliet
I just end up eating Dirty Unwashed Fruit
I mean you don’t really need to slice anything except melons
or oranges
or any citruses
but I mean bananas can be opened in 10 seconds and apples and pears are just eaten the way they are and berries you just have to spit out the core for some of them but others you can literally just grab and eat by a mouthful…
ah waiting for the season when they are not horribly expensive ;~;
(other than apples and bananas. those are a year-round treat)
Delicious Taffy
Enjoy your bananas while they fucking last.
miados
I only buy pears usually, but occasionally get some apple slices from mc donalds
Kamino Neko
If it were up to me (ie: I was making all the grocery decisions, and could afford it), there’d always be Clementines in the fridge (also, banana slices and strawberries in the freezer).
missilentmurmur