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Japanese Persimmon
PERSIMMON (Cooked Pudding) This pudding may be made by using to a quart of persimmon pulp two eggs, a pint of milk, a cupful of sugar, a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch, wet in part of the milk, and a heaping teaspoon of baking-powder. Where orange juice is desired as flavouring substitute a small spoonful of soda for the baking-powder. Bake in pudding-dish slowly for an hour and serve, while still warm, with cold milk or cream, though persimmons are too rich almost of themselves to be served with cream.
A baked persimmon custard rather than a steamed pudding, and unusual in carrying no flour at all — cornstarch and eggs do the setting. The whole thing rests on the ripeness of the fruit.
- Ripeness is the hingeAstringent varieties — the acorn-shaped Hachiya, and the native American persimmon — must be jelly-soft, almost collapsing, before the tannins have gone. Anything firm enough to slice will pucker the mouth and no amount of sugar or baking will fix it. Flat-topped Fuyu types are non-astringent and can be used firm, but give a milder, less interesting pulp.
- A quart of pulpFour cups, pressed through a colander or food mill to leave skins and the large seeds behind. Native persimmons are seedy and small; expect to work through several pounds. Large ripe Hachiya vary, but reckon on well under a cup of pulp apiece.
- "Slowly" means 300-325F"Slowly" -- The recipe gives no temperature. Read as a modern slow oven, somewhere in the region of 300-325F: an egg-and-milk pudding set in a wide dish wants gentle heat for the full hour, since higher heat curdles the custard at the edges before the centre firms. It is done when a knife near the middle comes out clean.
- The soda-and-orange substitutionSoda needs an acid to react with, and the orange juice presumably supplies it; that is the likely logic behind swapping soda for the powder, though the recipe does not say. "A small spoonful" is vague; half a teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of pulp is the sensible reading, and more will taste soapy and turn the pudding dark.
- Sugar to taste the fruitA cup is a lot for fully ripe Hachiya or kaki, which are already very sweet. Taste the pulp first and cut it to two-thirds of a cup if the fruit is honeyed.
- Vessel and yieldThe batter comes to some seven cups, so a 3-quart baking dish, buttered. Serves eight. The author's own note is worth taking: the pudding is rich enough that cold milk suits it better than cream.
The Japanese persimmon, Diospyros kaki, arrived in the United States in the decades after Perry's expedition to Japan, and USDA and nurseryman introductions in the 1870s and 1880s put it into California and the Gulf South, where the trees took hold quickly. Books of this period treat it as a novelty crop that home cooks needed instruction in, and the recipes they offer often seem borrowed from the older American tradition built on the wild native persimmon of the Midwest and Upper South \212 a small, seedy, intensely astringent fruit that country cooks pulped for puddings and "persimmon bread" after the first frosts. That inheritance shows here: the pudding is a plain milk-and-egg baked custard, thickened with cornstarch, of a kind one meets in nineteenth-century American manuals under whatever fruit happened to be in hand. The warning that persimmons are "too rich almost of themselves" for cream is a fair description of ripe kaki pulp, which has a slick, almost buttery body unlike any other orchard fruit.