For many years, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a Sunday feature called "Our Own Oddities," by Ralph Graczak. It featured such items as vegetables that resembled political figures and families whose offspring were all born on St. Patrick’s Day.
Kate Lebo’s The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (With Recipes) has a couple of gems that Midwesterners might recognize as well. The book of essays is an abecedarian (an alphabetically arranged compendium) featuring 26 fruits, each difficult in their own ways. The essays are often personal, at times technical, and sometimes wander far afield. Perhaps that wandering isn’t surprising, coming from Lebo, who’s a poet and apprentice cheesemaker, in addition to running a pastry academy.
Some of the book's topics, such as wheat, are fairly common. But most are fairly esoteric, including two Missouri references: N is for the Norton grape, and O is for the Osage orange.
To explain the Norton grape, Lebo interviewed Chaumette Vineyards & Winery owner Hank Johnson. Norton is the backbone of serious Missouri wine, producing a dry red that can be deep and mysterious, shattering all cliches about what grapes grown in highly variable climates like ours can be like. Properly handled, the wine is a joy to pair with game and other red meat. Joe Pollack, my late husband and the former wine columnist for the Post-Dispatch, discovered that it was a fine match for chocolate, too, and introduced the combination to visiting wine writers such as Barbara Ensrud and a conference held in St. Louis. Iconoclastic winemaker Randall Grahm made port from it that was so good, it made the wine list at St. Louis native Danny Meyer's Union Square Café in New York.
Stone Hill Winery president Jon Held says this year’s Norton crop suffered a little from a late frost, but the relatively rainy summer and late heat are indicators that the 2021 crop should be very good. Held points out that part of the game in growing Norton grapes is managing leafy canopy of vines; the grapes are happiest with diffused sunlight.
As for the lesser-known Osage orange—also nicknamed the hedge apple or Maclura pomifera, among other monikers—it's about the size of a small grapefruit, with a nubby green exterior. Lebo found them at a friend's house in Columbia, after her Iowa aunt referred to them as "trash fruit."
As a child in rural Missouri, I clearly recall the fruit's heft and hardness, as well as watching kids try to smash them open. Squirrels will nosh on the seeds in the white interior. Some use them as an insect deterrent inside the house, behind a sofa, perhaps, or in a basement. Folk wisdom? Maybe. The thorny, dense trees on which they grow also sometimes serve as fence posts, a habit of American settlers.
From early on, this member of the mulberry family had ties to St. Louis. Meriwether Lewis sent samples to President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 as a gift from “Mr. Peter Choteau,” translating the first name of one of our founding fathers from Pierre. Six years later, a traveling botanist noted that Pierre Choteau’s garden held two of the trees, which, like hollies, have male and female varieties. The French, as well as Lewis, noted that Native Americans often made bows from the strong but flexible wood, thus the nickname bois d’arc. That wood, which is orange in color, is sometimes used to make a long-lasting natural dye.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Book of Difficult Fruit lives up to The New York Times' review of Lebo's in-depth research and lyrical writing—that "what [Lebo] digs up for each is often fascinating, sometimes juicy, rarely dry"—complete with a recipe for fruit gelées, made with Norton grape juice.
