The Feijoa

One of my loves since childhood is gleaning fruit from the neighbourhood. When living in Australia I would often plan my route to the tram-stop on my way to Uni so I would pass the best fruit; pomegranates, figs, loquats, grapes, peaches, oranges, lilly-pilly, and of course the underrated feijoa. The feijoa is native to parts of South America but is a very popular garden tree in New Zealand and Australia. Most people, I'm assuming, outside of these places wouldn't have a clue about what a feijoa is; spell-check is convinced it's not a word (suggesting instead feisty, feint, feign and fellatio). But I assure you it's a real thing.
After moving to Adelaide when I was three years old, we settled in our first place, a pretty white bungalow in a leafy suburb. The property included a splendidly large back-yard with a loquat tree (I would gorge on the sweet yellow fruit when in season), and a small front yard with an ever so gorgeous Frangipanni shading the front verandah and an unassuming feijoa tree in the corner. When ripe, most of the fruit would just fall off the tree and be left uneaten, this was a common site around the neighbourhood. But I appreciated those little feijoas, occasionally grabbing a handful and pulling them apart to spoon or suck out the sweet innards. Since moving house over ten years ago I've had to steal feijoas from other people's trees, but that only makes them taste sweeter of course.
Anyway...the reason I'm writing so earnestly about this little green fruit is that the other day on a brisk autumn evening here in Riga, Latvia, next to the limes in my local supermarket was a pile of feijoas! They were 3.50AUD a kilogram and grown in Italy. This is a fruit which I had never seen in a shop before and definitely never expected to find anywhere near Eastern Europe; plus, I've never bought one or even imagined I would, I'd only ever picked them off someone's lawn! So I bought one and the cashier didn't know what it was, but after five minutes of confused searching for the item number I finally had in my possession a little green feijoa. The smell instantly transported me back to that Angas Rd. front garden, sitting on the grass sucking the soft flesh out of the smooth green fruit. Standing in the kitchen after returning from the supermarket I savoured the flavour once more. It tasted like a feijoa, but I don't think I'll buy them more because they'll never be as satisfying as when they are stolen from a neighbour's tree while walking to the tram-stop on a cool morning.

I found this lovely little piece from the blog 'Spleen' about how to eat a feijoa properly:

How to eat a feijoa

The feijoa is a sadly underrated fruit. We don't see it at its best in the shops, and if we grow them at home, their brief abundance is so overwhelming as to render us ungrateful.

Some people, it seems, do not know how to eat a jeifoa.

1. Address the feijoa. Admire its glossy, bumpy green skin, its ovoid form, the grey rosette that adorns its base.
2. Grasp the feijoa firmly in your non-dominant hand.
3. Slice the feijoa in half, through its equator.
4. Pause to inspect the interior. there should be a multi-lobed zone of jelly. Isn't that pretty?
5. Hold a feijoa half in your non-dominant hand, with the cut surface outwards.
6. With teaspoon, carefully scoop out the flesh and pulp. There is a happy medium between leaving edible fruit behind, and taking in the acrid lining of the skin.
7. Consume directly from the spoon.
8. Repeat 6 and 7 with remaining feijoa half.

If you are a small child, and the fruit are very ripe, you can bite off the end of the feijoa like an American sergeant with a cheap cigar, and squeeze the innards into your mouth. This method also works for passionfruit. However, this is not manners.

Image by Sandy Austin