Meet the Medlar

Maybe you've seen a medlar before, perhaps even tasted one. I hadn't until a few days ago when a co-worker handed me half of one of these papery, pulpy fruits and said, "here, try this."

These members of the rose family, cousins of the apple, natives of Persia are quite peculiar. They're picked in late autumn, at which point they're green and hard and inedible, then stored and left to go through a process of fermentation and decay called "bletting," during which they turn soft and brown. Now it just remains to tear through the thin, papery skin to reveal the rich, aromatic pulp inside.

It is hard to describe medlars. They're not like anything I've eaten before. If I had to make a comparison, I would say the pulp tastes and feels very much like thick, rich apple sauce. It is subtly sweet and ever so slightly bitter on the aftertaste. A friend tried to compare medlars to persimmons, but I think the only similarity there is the bletting process both fruits go through to become edible. I was not convinced by the first bite, but kept eating and bought several to take home with me.

I enjoy eating them as is--tearing the skin and sucking out the pulp, taking care to spit out the large, slippery seeds. The Oxford Companion to Food said that in Victorian England medlars were brought to table where the pulp was scraped out and mixed with sugar and cream for dessert. Other options for medlars are jelly or medlar cheese, made like lemon curd, or something of your own creation, such as the piece of toast with medlar and stinky cheese Y. just handed me.

It is always a pleasure to try a new food, particularly one as exotic as a medlar. For this I have Scott Farm to thank, and the turns of fate that brought me to Vermont.

Sansa Apples with Landaff Cheese

It was still summer when I picked up my first half-peck of fruit from Scott Farm. The bag was loaded with peaches and plums and the heady aroma of soft, ripe fruit. A week later fall had arrived and, while peaches from the farm were still available, my csa share was mostly apples. To be more precise, it was a half-peck of the most beautiful Sansa apples. I'm glad they wrote the variety on the bag or I might have made the mistake of cooking them.

I did a tiny bit of internet research and learned that the Sansa is the product of 20 years of Japanese-Australian co-operation beginning in 1969. It is an early maturing apple with a beautiful red-blush-over-yellow-green skin. It's flesh is firm yet tender, juicy, and very sweet with just the right amount of tartness. Sansas are not keepers and should be eaten soon after harvest.

I ate my first Sansa without accompaniment, taking one crisp, juicy, sweet bite after the other and practically devouring the core. I got to thinking about it, because these are the things I think about, and decided the crisp sweetness of the apple would be contrasted nicely by a buttery, kinda tangy, sorta salty, mostly mellow cheese--a Welsh style cheddar, for instance. The cheese I had in mind was Cobb Hill's Four Corners Caerphilly, but the Co-op was out of stock. I ended up with a nice piece of Landaff Cheese, a Welsh style semi-firm farmstead cheese made from raw milk in New Hampshire and aged at Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont. I was not disappointed. These are the things, some of them anyway, that make me feel very lucky to have landed in Vermont.

I can highly recommend both the apple and the cheese for any snack or platter or cheese plate or fruit plate or dessert. To make a meal of it, I could see adding some walnuts to the mix and a bit of cured meat and a hunk of good bread, a glass of beer or wine and, of course, at least one good friend.

Do let the cheese stand at room temperature for half an hour or so before serving to bring out all the flavors and to be able to truly enjoy its buttery texture. Squeeze lemon juice over the apple wedges to preserve their beautiful white flesh.