The first time I ever had a persimmon was when I was living in France.  We had been in France for about six months and didn’t really know very many French people yet.   Our children, four- and five-years-old at the time, were enrolled in a French school, and that was our saving grace.  It’s wonderful how having young children gives you entry into a community.  Once our children started being invited to their classmates’ birthday parties, their parents started inviting us over for dinner.  Having dinner in a French household is a wonderful gustatory journey.  The first time we went, while our children played with their children, our hosts invited us out onto their sun-drenched back patio, where we nibbled appetizers and drank aperitifs.

Our first introduction to French hospitality was also my first introduction to the persimmon.  Our appetizers were lovely toothpicks on which were speared a small chunk of persimmon, then a morsel of prosciutto, then a small chunk of cucumber.  This might remind you of the well-known appetizer of melon and prosciutto found in many restaurants, but the persimmon is much more luscious than any melon.  It is so sweet that you would swear it had been marinated in sugar.  It also has an intoxicating color, more passionate than a cantaloupe but less extravagant than a blood orange.  The combination of the impossibly sweet persimmon with the salty earthiness of the prosciutto and the cool impartiality of the cucumber was the culinary equivalent of a wonderful novel—unstoppable momentum towards an emotional denouement, and then a well-controlled ending.

When I look back at my first taste of persimmon, I’m surprised that it took so long.  For one thing, persimmons are very popular in Asia.  My parents really enjoy eating persimmons.  You can find persimmons in drinks, in desserts, as dried fruit.  They’re pretty ubiquitous in the fall.  Yet I had never tried one until I was a grown-up living in France.

I did try to recreate that wonderful appetizer when my family returned to the States.  I assembled my chunks of cucumber, prosciutto, and persimmon on toothpicks and passed them around as an hors d’oeuvre at a dinner party we were hosting.  They were a huge flop.  The persimmons felt and tasted like hard, dried, chalky orange glue.  It was really embarrassing.

I imagine this is a paler version of the embarrassment Li-Young Lee talks of in his poem “Persimmon,” when his sixth-grade teacher makes him stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between “persimmon” and “precision,” on the day she has brought persimmons, which she calls a “Chinese apple”, to class and cuts them up so that all the students can taste a morsel but which Lee already knows the children will not like because the persimmons are not yet ripe.  Since my failed attempt to recreate the appetizer, I have been wary of this fruit, convinced I could not unlock its sweetness.  But every autumn, when persimmons are in season, I would glance at them in grocery stores, jealous of the people who confidently bought them, wondering what secret they knew that I didn’t.

Finally, this year, I decided to give myself another chance and bought some persimmons.  I made sure the persimmons were soft and ripe, to avoid that dried glue taste.  When I got them home, I wanted to try one immediately, so I peeled one.  And it pretty much turned to a slick, juicy mess in my hands.  Still edible, and deliciously sweet, but very messy.  And not at all like the persimmon I had in France.

To figure out what I was doing wrong, I turned to an expert—my mother.  And she gave me my persimmon lesson:

There are two types of persimmons.  One kind has the shape of a miniature pumpkin that’s been flattened from the top and the bottom, which is the kind I’d just bought.  She told me that you must buy these in the fall when they are still firm, like an apple (which Li-Young Lee’s teacher knew and I obviously hadn’t).   The soft and squishy ones are overripe.  My mother likes to cut the persimmon into four quarter wedges.  She slices away the thin white filament that runs vertically through the core of the fruit because it can cause constipation if you eat it.  Then she peels the skin away and eats the fruit.  So simple, once you know.

The other kind of persimmon is shaped like a really fat teardrop.  You can also buy these in the fall, but they are much too bitter to be eaten then.  These persimmons are like stubborn misanthropes.  They like to be left alone for a long time.  In Korea, people used to leave them in a shed (these days an unheated garage can serve the same purpose) and ignore them all winter long.  Then, in the spring, as the weather begins to warm, it’s as if the persimmon come out of hibernation and begin to ripen.  Over the course of the spring, you must peel back just the tiniest sliver of skin and lick the exposed flesh to see if the fruit has fully ripened.  If it still hasn’t fully sweetened, then it needs to sit a little longer by itself until it is ready.

Once the slow strip-tease of the persimmon’s skin finally reveals that the fruit is ready is when you must practice strict self-control and abstinence.  Do not eat the persimmon.  Instead, put the persimmon in the freezer and force yourself to forget about them again.  You don’t need to slice them, you don’t even need to wrap them; just put them whole, original, into suspended animation in the freezer and ignore them.

Five to six months later, in the stifling, brutal heat of summer, take one of the persimmons out of the freezer and cut off the top.  With a spoon, gently scoop out the slightly-thawed but still refreshingly chilly fruit and put in your mouth.  Savor, linger.  Better than ice cream.

Then, start all over again in autumn.  One persimmon for instant gratification.  Another persimmon for delayed gratification.  I wish I had known this all those years ago and saved myself the embarrassment of serving the wrong persimmon.

Like Li-Young Lee’s difficulty distinguishing between “persimmon” and “precision” because English is not his first language, I couldn’t distinguish between the two varieties of persimmon and didn’t know how to eat them correctly because I am not fluent in Korean culture.  Being born in one culture but growing up in another often feels like a constant struggle for an elusive bilingual and bi-cultural competency that will ultimately, in theory, make us feel like we belong.