Thursday, March 11, 2004
EAT MY JACK
I read somewhere that the word “jack” has more different definitions than any other word in this mongrel language I speak. I guess that’s reasonable - it’s a fun word, with good strong phonemes to start and finish it, well suited for speaking, shouting, or whispering. It’s not my intention to get into my traditional favorite flavors of “jack,” though we all know them only too well, or at least, as well as is necessary under most circumstances. Rather, I’m going to focus on, arguably, the most exotic jack I can lay my hands on.
Exotic jack, you ask in wonderment? For a word barely more unusual than the name “John,” it seems incongruous to invoke exoticism. But that’s because you’re not a fruit.
And for the record, neither am I. But a bunch of them hang around the front doorway of my grocery store and that’s where exotic Jack was loitering a few nights ago, just waiting to catch my eye amidst the cukes and the zukes. In fact, there was a whole bin of jackfruit, gleaming green in the foggy night. $.79/lb, I think. I’ll admit - I was intrigued. It represented something of a departure for me, an untested variation on a theme, if you will. Maybe I shouldn’t say it in such a public place, but I do have a bit of a penchant for tasting the odd strange fruit. (Not the strange odd fruit, mind you. These distinctions of word order matter to me, as will become evident hereinbelow.) And these bargain jackfruits fit the bill. Curiosity began to get the better of me.
Now, your jackfruit bears more than a passing resemblance to your durian, called by some the King of Fruits. I tried to try durian once at an Indonesian restaurant in my ‘hood (I tell you, we’ve got it all out here in the central Richmond). Durian milkshake was on the menu and I ordered it. The waiter looked solicitously concerned. “American people don’t like this,” he warned me. “Well, I’m openminded.” “I’ll bring it out and you can see if you still want it.” “Okay.” I was confident in my ability to eat anything they served. Then the waiter brought out a tupperware tub with a sliver of fruit in it, opened it up for my inspection. It smelled like someone had found a severed finger in a pile of rotten tablescraps and left it to ripen in a bag on top of the fridge for a week. Here’s a picture of how it smells. I ordered a beer.
So durian was off my list. And jackfruit looked disturbingly like it - the size of an overfed toddler, a rich tropical green entirely covered with little pointed lumps. But this wasn’t a durian, it was a jack. I couldn’t let appearances dictate my cuilinary choices. Otherwise I’d like mint ice cream and I’d turn down kitfo, and that’s not the kind of life our troops fought to protect in Grenada. Despite myself, I started getting hungry for jackfruit, and I didn’t even know what it tasted like.
I found out soon enough, though. As we breezed though the indoor produce section I saw a clerk strolling around with a quarter of a jackfruit cut open, its golden flesh revealed nakedly to both neon lighting and god. I seized my chance. “Is this jackfruit?,” I asked him. “How is it used?”
His language skills left something to be desired but he conveyed to me with words and in pantomime that I should yank from the quartered fruit a chunk of yellow flesh surrounding a white pit. I was then to pull off and discard some connective fibers and eat what was left. I had to wrestle with it a bit to get my fingers around the elusive prize, but eventually I outsmarted the produce and peeled off a few tasty morsels.
I found the jack to be rather dry and a little rubbery, but easy to chew and delicately melon-flavored. After I was done my hands were unexpectedly sticky with infinitesimal amounts of jack juice. I wound up going to the frozen section and handling some random cans of juice and bags of veggies, letting the frost that dusted them melt over my fingers to wash it off.
My experiment with jackfruit was a qualified success. I liked the flavor, though the product overall seemed inconvenient in size and process. I also was glad to share a special moment or two with the jack-man, who offered me his fruit. On the way home, I expressed appreciation for the richness of the experience to Kel. She replied, “It’s great, sure. He let you manhandle his jackfruit. Or jackhandle his manfruit.” But while the former was true, the latter certainly was not. And that’s why I say, word order matters. For some it’s only a technical difference, but its extremely important to me. How Jack feels about it, is something you’ll have to ask him.
