Milking the Rooster

Bless the feijoa bounty! This post celebrates feijoas, and reveals an inadvertently poignant recipe, chicken feijoa.

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It’s the end of the fruit season, and just about everything except a few apples we picked today, and the odd orange is finished. Except the feijoas. They’re still coming on strong.

If you don’t know about feijoas, you should. Along with persimmons and tamarillos, they’re one of the great late fruiters of the temperate climates. Originally from South America, they taste a bit like a guava (but better than most varieties), a full sweet sour flavour and a slightly grainy texture. Ours are much bigger than any others I’ve seen, getting up to almost the size of tennis balls.

They’re pretty labour intensive to preserve though. Unlike tamarillos they don’t hang around and stay ripe on the tree for months. And the skin is a bit astringent and bitter, so you’re better off peeling them if you want to stew them.

Last week I spent a couple of hours peeling, while simultaneously making a rooster soup, and then to my horror watched myself put rooster meat into the wrong pot. I picked most of it out, put the meat in the intended soup pot (which benefited from a bit of a fruity undertone) and tasted the other result. Nothing goes to waste here. The result was, as Aya says, “challenger”. Actually, not exactly bad, a slight chickeny taste in your breakfast stewed fruit. Not exactly easy eating either. A lean mix of rooster flesh filaments floating through the feijoa pulp. Aya found a small feather Seb didn’t fully pluck out. But we’re the gastronomic avant garde here. Recipes are mere launching pads to unchartered territory. Show us a rule, and we’ll fry that rule in beer and buckwheat flour, eat it with a side salad of cognitive dissonance.

So anyway we ate it, even Aya, so steeped in the rules of Japanese cooking traditions. But we did not eat it all. The above pictured bottle has been left amongst the other preserved fruits, several rows back, in the basement, to be discovered by future caretakers. Will they they marvel at the meaning of it? Will they dare open it? Will they taste it? Will they declare it sweet or savoury, or will it defy classification? Will they even be able to see it, just as we fail to notice so many things fantastical, amorphous and unclassified? Will it collect dust, a rude and repellant object, its contents unthinkable?

Confronted by the unclassified we so often choose ignorance, or risk falling into those swirling waters between the crusted and calcified atolls of codified human knowledge. We cast this chicken feijoa off into that sea. A haunted feeling fills me as I think of it’s cold, dark depths and the unknown wonders within them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 8:01 pm and is filed under food, recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.