Passion Fruit
One last wild fruit find before the air turns cold
Like a lot of 30-something introverts, I’m a big fan of the Great British Bake Off. I’ve been watching it for years, and it’s one of those perfect shows whose reruns can still hold my attention. I often put it on for background noise if I’m trying to write after the rest of the house is sleeping.
A fruit the contestants use often for custards and other sort of fillings is passion fruit. When I started watching the show, I had never tasted one before. It was something I had never seen in my (rural Kentucky) grocery store. It always looked totally appetizing to me, though, with its bright yellowy pulp dotted with small black seeds.
I was an adult before I knew about the native American passion fruit, Passiflora incarnata. On a hike in the Clinch mountains with my aunt, I first spotted a passion flower growing. I was surprised to see it, because the only surrounding plants were familiar natives, and this looked absolutely tropical. Purple and cream, with sturdy centers and frizzy adornments on the petals, it was news to me when I found out that something so exotic was, indeed, as native as the iron weed I had just walked past.
That first encounter was several years ago, and I didn’t recognize another growing in the wild until late last summer. In a ditch beside the road on my old after supper walking route, I saw a pair of the flowers. I visited them just about every evening, and watched as their fruit developed. It grew to the size of a chicken egg, and was a soft but vibrant green. Not until they were nearing ripeness did I think about how these fruits were in the yard of the house they grew in front of. I was too shy to knock on the door and ask if I could have one, so I watched them ripen day by day until they fell off the vine and into the weeds, maybe eaten by a possum, maybe sprouting into a hundred other plants.
I was on a leaf peeping hike this past week with my toddler, sister, and grandma when we came across some passion vines. Their leaves are distinctive, and once you get to know them, they’re fairly easy to recognize. There was vine after vine, and it only took lifting a few leaves up before we spotted some fruit. The first one was so ripe that it fell off in my hand when I touched it.
It was such a nice surprise to encounter this wild fruit on a day we weren’t expecting it, and we gathered about a dozen small passion fruits to eat and plant. I ate three while we were hiking, and could have easily eaten more.
It was nice to finally put a flavor to all of those delicious-looking Bake Off custards I’d been wishing for a bite of. Perhaps a little pineappley, a little citrusy, but really a flavor all its own, the passion fruit was perfectly ripe and juicy. The inside of the fruit is made up of many small black seeds encased in pulp. The seeds can be crunched up, spit out, or swallowed with the pulp. There are so many seeds that they would be a chore to eat if they weren’t so darn delicious.
The fruit we didn’t eat while we admired the foliage, we brought home for other family members to try. It was a hit all around, enjoyed by people, (a sneaky) dog, and goat alike. I’ve already planted quite a few seeds to try to get my own passion patches started. I can’t wait to see if they come up next year, and if they do, to sit by the vines and eat as many of the fruits as I can in one sitting.