Fruit and Shakespeare: Things I Learned in Bundanoon

Bundanoon Makers' Markets

Bundanoon is a nice little town in the Southern Highlands. They made headlines in 2008 and 2009 for becoming the first place in the world to ban the sale of bottled water, and it's a township that is also well-known for hosting Brigadoon, the 'largest highlander gathering in the southern hemisphere' (not an actual quote, but this is the sort of thing said about it. It basically means lots of people put kilts on and strut about on the heath). 

My wife and I have a special place in our hearts for the Southern Highlands. It's only an hour and a half south of Sydney yet still feels like a whole world away. It's also where we got married, and we travel back down there several times a year. 

Gosh, that makes me feel so old. I used to spend my weekends going to pubs and watching punk bands, now I go on bush walks and visit craft shops in Moss Vale. 

This was one of three lyrebirds we saw in the highlands; the other two were feathered and moving but, alas, this was the only one I managed to photograph.

Anyway, the point of this post is that while gadding about in the highlands last weekend, the Duck and I happened across the Bundanoon Makers' Market and met one Rachel Russell, a maker and purveyor of home-harvested jams, preserves and spreads. Here she is, pictured below after I awkwardly asked if I could take a photo of her stand:

Rachel Russell and her home made wares

Ms. Russell introduced me to the wonders of the medlar, a fruit the likes of which I have never heard. As it turns out, this humble-looking fruit has a certain historical and literary significance. The medlar is an ancient winter fruit referenced in many Shakespeare plays (and throughout the Jacobean and Elizabethan eras in general), and its quirky look lends it a variety of euphemistic nicknames that allude to 'open bottoms' and the like. 

Note this quote from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, in which he bawdily references the medlar in relation to Romeo wanting to 'get some':

Now he will sit under a medlar tree,

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open-arse and thou a pop'rin pear!

I also learned from Ms. Russell about something called bletting, whereby fruit is softened beyond ripening through a process (in this case frostbite) and the toxins are broken down to allow it to become more edible. 

Bletting lends itself to the idiom, "Time and straw make the medlars ripe" (referenced in Don Quixote), and there are a whole host of other allusions related to the innocuous looking little fruit. Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker bleakly says in reference to the poor medlar (and bletting), "Women are like medlars - no sooner ripe but rotten".

What a charmer.

Meanwhile, the Edwardian novelist D. H. Lawrence said medlars were "wineskins of brown morbidity", proving that he too had a fatalistic view of innocuous foodstuffs.

Yum!

Anyway, the Duck purchased some chardemedlar from Ms. Russell; an Elizabethan-styled medlar paste for use with cheese or crackers. I tasted some this afternoon on a teaspoon. It tasted like a deep, dark apple stew that had been squeezed out of a dusty medieval Christmas dessert feast. I liked it.