The Sacred Persimmon
Gen. Thomas Sumter, the gamecock of the American Revolution, and defender of Charleston in his latter days gloried in telling stories of the heroic days fighting the British. Many of these tales he imparted at society dinners at which he was a fixture during the 1820s. Hostesses sought to impress the old hero with fancy fare, but he would talk instead of eat the ragouts and fricassees. He was tempted by only two menu items, the southern classic “bacon and greens” and persimmon pudding.
“On the General’s plantation persimmon trees were sacred, and might grow wherever they choose, ‘because,’ he said, ‘a persimmon tree kept one British bullet from lodging in my heart.’”
The native persimmon is a tallish tree and produces modest sized fruit with a substantial stone or stones. The unripened fruit was famous for its mouth-puckering astringency and consumers in hill country tended to wait for the first frost to be certain that the fruit could be eaten. Closer to the coast it ripened well before a frost came (if it ever did). Once ripe the fruit had a custardy consistency and a mild, mellow apricot-like flavor (Captain John Smith so characterized it when he bit into his first persimmon near Jamestown in 1607). Deer and possum loved the fruit so greatly that some farmers ringed cornfields with persimmon trees to protect the grain crop. Hard to harvest and difficult to preserve, early Carolinians dried the fruit as a Christmas treat, or mashed it into fruit leather. Would be cultivators complained that there was not enough fruit for the bother, and repeatedly promoted from the 1880s onward the introduction of Japanese and Chinese varieties which were larger, meatier, and less tannic when immature.
Despite the bother of the crop (it had to be plucked or dislodged by a tall pole), foragers kept quantities available in the markets in season, and a number of autumnal preparations were installed in Lowcountry cuisine. During the Civil War the general dearth of commercial vinegar led to the home production of persimmon vinegar. Persimmon Beer was a favorite country drink.
Persimmon trees came to emblematize autumn. The avidity of possum for the fruit made the late autumn persimmon stuffed possum a legendary dish or rural connoisseurship. L. T. Levin’s 1909 poem “Autumn” observed,
Persimmons is now golden,
But soon dey’ll git right blue
De ‘possum is beholdin’
De food he can’t es-chew.
Yet the nostalgia of the poem suggests that in the 20th century, the persimmon was becoming passé, an emblem of past tastes and pleasures. Five years later this sense of a lost fruit of a lost world becomes explicit in a lyric entitled “Boyland.” An old man speaks:
We forget the old road often,
And the dust of toil and strife
Hides the valley of its magic
In the later years of life:
But it’s not so hard to find it—
When again you chance to see
The ripe persimmons hanging
On the old persimmon tree:
To Boyland, loved old Boyland,
With its music and its thrall
When the frost has ksit the pumpkins
And the ripened chestnuts fall.
Sources: “Persimmon Beer,” Charleston Mercury (August 16, 1861), 1. “Bacon and Greens,” Charleston News and Courier (August 19, 1907), 7. Vinegar, Charleston Courier 63 (December 9, 1864), 1. “Boyland,” Charleston Post and Courier (October 18, 1914), 4.