Deer hunters often refer to ripe persimmons as “nature’s candy.” That’s because whitetails are drawn to the sticky, sweet fruits of this widespread tree like bees to sourwood blossoms or monarch butterflies to milkweed. Mind you, country cousins have taught more than one city slicker a bitter lesson in practical close-to-the-earth wisdom by inducing them to bite into a persimmon yet to reach full ripeness. The result is pucker power to the ’nth degree. But when fully ripened, these luscious fruits draw not only deer but coons, possums, foxes, coyotes, bears, and a host of other critters, including humans, and if you’ve never sampled and savored a properly prepared persimmon pudding, then yours has been a life of culinary deprivation.

Persimmons are but one of many late summer and autumnal offerings of fruit from nature’s rich, varied larder. Also included are pawpaws, wild plums, and an impressive variety of wild grapes. Added to those are maypops, passion flower fruit also sometimes known as wild apricots; crab apples for jelly; ground cherries, not exactly wild but a volunteer fruit that often pop up as volunteers in plantings of corn; and mulberries, not a berry despite the name. Anyone with sufficient gumption and a basic knowledge of natural history has bounty awaiting them in South Carolina’s fields and woods. It’s free for the gathering, and foraging gourmets have every reason to relish what is on offer for their sweet tooth.

Persimmons shine as a sweet snack or for use in desserts. Once the fruit ripens, a magical transformation occurs, resulting in a sweet, sticky treat with overtones of honey. Delicious eaten raw, persimmons can also be dried and preserved as fruit leather, used to make mead-like beer, or best of all, as the key ingredient of breads and puddings. In my mind’s eye, I still envision my paternal grandfather pushing back from the table after a hearty dish of Grandma Minnie’s persimmon pudding and enthusiastically passing judgment: “My, ain’t that fine. It will sure make a fellow sit up and take notice!”

Grandma Minnie never measured anything when cooking, unless you consider things such as a pinch, dab, or “precious plenty” measurements, so the best I can do when it comes to this marvelous dessert is offer a modern version with specific measurements. If you have access to a plentitude of persimmons — and they grow widely — maybe prior to Thanksgiving or Yuletide you can plan a pudding. Alternatively, many stores now sell Asian persimmons. These are perhaps 15 to 20 times as large as wild ones, contain few seeds if any, and carry every bit of the flavor of their wild cousins.

Persimmon Pudding

½ teaspoon baking soda
2 cups persimmon pulp
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
2½ cups milk

4 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat oven to 325 F and butter a 9 by 13-inch baking pan. In a mixing bowl, combine the persimmon pulp, baking soda, sugar, and eggs. Mix well. Then add flour, baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, milk, and melted butter. Mix thoroughly with a whisk. Pour into the pan and bake for 50 to 60 minutes. The pudding should cool for at least a half hour before serving. It will fall a bit while cooling. Keep servings small because this is an exceptionally rich dessert. My first taste of persimmon pudding “flung a craving on me,” as comedian Jerry Clower used to put it, and it has remained a personal favorite ever since.

Persimmon Bread

Intervening decades have led me to a delightful discovery that further enhanced this traditional foodstuff’s appeal. It involves the same fruit but is, if anything, a dessert I cherish even more than pudding. I first encountered persimmon bread in a recipe developed by famed chef James Beard. My version varies somewhat, but I think anyone who tries it will discover why, as a wizened and wise fellow from my boyhood once said to me with great earnestness, “I’m mighty partial to persimmons.”

You want the fruits to be squishy ripe; incidentally, pulp freezes well, so try this irresistible offering at Thanksgiving or Christmas and I think you’ll see why he was “mighty partial.”

2 brimming cups of persimmon pulp
3½ cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
Pinch (maybe half a teaspoon or a bit less) of nutmeg or allspice
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup melted butter, cooled to room temperature
4 large eggs, lightly whisked
1 cup black walnuts
2 cups dried fruit such as apricots, raisins, yellow raisins, or dates
⅔ cup bourbon (any brand is fine)

Optional: substitute black walnuts for two cups of lightly toasted and chopped pecans or English walnuts, although black walnuts are more flavorful.

Butter a pair of loaf pans. Sift flour, salt, spice, soda, and sugar into a large plastic mixing bowl. Whisk in the butter, eggs, bourbon, and persimmon pulp until thoroughly mixed. Add and whisk in nuts and dried fruit. Place batter in pans and slide into preheated 350 F oven. As bread begins to brown, check periodically by inserting a toothpick. When the toothpick comes out clean the bread is ready. Cooking time varies depending on configuration of pans you use.

Note: Once cooled, wrap to keep moist. The bread will keep several days — though it is likely to be eaten much sooner — and freezes well. It is rich and somewhat reminiscent of a dark fruit cake.

Scuppernong Pie

The same pies that are made from domestic muscadines or scuppernongs — the words are often used interchangeably — renowned among aficionados of regional cookery in this part of the world, can also be prepared using wild grapes.

3 to 4 cups of muscadines
1 cup sugar, slightly more if needed
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons butter
Cinnamon or apple pie spice
Pastry for a two-crust pie

Preheat oven to 300 F.  Wash grapes. Use two medium-sized enamel saucepans, squeezing pulp into one and placing hulls in the other. Cover hulls with water, cook until tender, and drain. Run through a sieve to remove seeds. Combine hulls and pulp. Mix sugar and cornstarch. Add scuppernong mixture and dot with butter. Sprinkle with spice. Pour into pastry-lined pie pan, cover with strips of pastry, and bake until golden brown.

A Fondness for Fox Grapes

One of my many treasured food memories connected with autumn involves fox grapes, thanks to a family interest in them. Both my Grandma Minnie and Aunt Emma Casada Burnett were passing fond of fox grape jelly and made runs every autumn if they could get the essential ingredient. Accordingly, during the summer months from early boyhood on, I kept a keen eye out for vines. As anyone familiar with them likely realizes, they have a distinct preference for branch and stream banks.

Recently, while tending the 30 or 40 muscadine vines I cultivate on my property, some twist of mind brought fox grapes into my thoughts. That in turn evoked a warm flow of memories, and I decided to do a bit of digging into the subject. To my surprise, although I probably should have expected as much since the use of colloquialisms runs rampant when it comes to foods from the wild, in some places what I always knew as possum grapes or frost grapes are actually known as fox grapes, while the fox grapes I knew as a lad are in fact wild muscadines.

Unlike the tiny, tightly clustered possum grapes of my lexicon, a fruit requiring some frost before offering more than a hint of sugar, muscadines can be quite sweet when fully ripened and are delicious to eat raw. They do retain enough acidity, however, to remind your tongue of that fact should you overindulge. That pectin makes the fruit ideal for jelly. You never have to worry about the end product setting well.

From a practical standpoint, these blurred lines of just what to call the grapes don’t matter. What is important is the delicious, slightly musky taste they have when made into jelly and the sweet-tart taste treat they provide when dead ripe. Incidentally, when fully ripe wild muscadines will literally fall from the vine with a bit of shaking, and as is the case with persimmons, seemingly every woodland mammal competes for these treats. Even catfish enjoy the feast. More than once in the fall I’ve caught a mess of “Mr. Whiskers” filled with ripe muscadines that had fallen into the water from overhanging vines.

A cluster of vines — and where one is growing are usually several in the general area — can yield a peck or even a half bushel of grapes. That’s enough for a good run of jelly, and the “gatherer” always got a share of the scrumptious end results. Indeed, long after I was grown and gone from home, far removed from the simple pleasures of gathering nature’s wild bounty, my Aunt Emma remembered just how much her greedy-gut nephew enjoyed grape jelly. From my culinary perspective, a cathead biscuit with a dollop of butter and adornment of wild muscadine jelly is something finer than any jar of marmalade or jam carrying a seal stating its producer is purveyor to English royalty.

Wild Muscadine Jelly

Start by squeezing the pulp from the skins and placing in separate bowls. Remove the seeds from the pulp. This is easily done with a plastic sieve with small holes. Discard the seeds. Cook the skins in a saucepan (with just enough water to keep them from sticking) until they are tender, and then combine with the pulp/juice mix. For each cup of the recombined mixture add ¾ cup of sugar or to taste — some folks like jelly with a bit of tartness or “bite” to it. Bring the mixture to a slow boil for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring frequently until it becomes noticeably thick. At this point, pour into sterilized half-pint or pint jars and allow to cool. Seal them with melted paraffin or two-piece lids. A cup of fruit with the seeds removed will make about a half pint of jelly.

Wild Apricots

My personal experience with wild apricots, which are what many country folks call maypops, is limited. In late summer and into the fall, anytime I come across vines, which are common in open areas and readily noticeable when the oval fruits ripen and turn yellow, I pick a few to eat on the spot. The edible portion is the juicy flesh around the seeds. It has a tangy, sweet-sour taste that is quite refreshing.

Native Americans made a drink from the fruit, and I’m sure that an infusion of juice from the tiny orbs of translucent fluid surrounding each seed, perhaps mixed with lemonade or just water and a bit of sorghum syrup or honey, would produce a delightful beverage. It’s just something I’ve never tried, although I’ve eaten the flesh and seen others do it times without number.

Pawpaws

Pawpaws are far more common in the wild than many folks realize, and as is the case with persimmons, if you beat wildlife to them, you have a great delicacy. The father of our country knew as much; pawpaw pudding was one of George Washington’s favorite desserts, and presumably the wild fruit grew well around Mt. Vernon. Across the South, you’ll most frequently find pawpaws in low, slightly damp areas of fairly rich soil. Once you become familiar with the plants, they absolutely jump out at you in the woods. Pawpaws tend to grow in sizeable patches and, while not exactly what would be styled a tree, can grow as high as 30 to 40 feet.

They are readily discernible, depending on the season, because of a number of characteristics. In the spring, their blooms, which are deep maroon and quite attractive when viewed up close, appear before leaf buds have done anything more than begin to show a hint of green. Once spring has fully arrived, the impressive size of the leaves makes the plant distinctive, as does the smooth, silvery bark of the trunks and limbs. The fruit, which looks somewhat like a stubby miniature banana, is the largest of any fruit tree indigenous to North America. Fruits, usually in clusters, are green through the summer but turn yellow with brown spots as they ripen in late September and early October. Sometimes they will be heavy enough to bend limbs in a noticeable fashion.

Every critter in the woods seems to like the fruit. It has a flesh with custard-like consistency sprinkled with black seeds. Quite aromatic, its taste is variously described as having hints of pineapple, banana, or papaya. In truth, pawpaws have their own special flavor and texture whether enjoying them raw, in custard, baked, or in a pudding.

Pawpaw Pudding

1 cup of pawpaw pulp, seeds removed
1¼ cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ cup melted butter
1 teaspoon ginger (optional)
3 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2½ teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg

Strain the pawpaw pulp using a plastic sieve to remove seeds. Mix it with all the other ingredients and bake in a well-greased pan for approximately an hour at 350 F — when done, it will begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool and cut into squares.

Pawpaw Bread

This sweet dish is suitable either as a breakfast treat, perhaps buttered or served with cream cheese, or by itself.

1 cup of butter, softened, plus a small pat to grease the baking pan
2½ cups flour
¼ teaspoon table salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1¾ cups sugar
4 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla
3 cups pawpaw pulp, seeds removed

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease 2 loaf pans with butter. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. Cream sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time and beat well after each addition. Add the vanilla and pawpaw pulp then beat until fully combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix only until the flour is incorporated. Do not overmix. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and place in oven. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes or until brown, starting to leave the sides of the pans, and checks done when a thin knife blade is inserted. Allow to cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from pans.

Jim Casada has written extensively on foods from the wild, with his most recent work in the field being Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food, coauthored with Tipper Pressley.