Slightly Sooty Salad: Tracking elusive persimmon thumbprint

I would like more connection to the land we live on. I would like more narrative songs to document and color our lives. A foraging trip to Greenwood Cemetery seems like a good first step toward those goals. There is something satisfying about the texture of the land in Greenwood Cemetery: the bowls, banks, knobs, and valleys. I have been thinking about how a person might know a natural place so well as to be able to navigate long distances without a map, compass, or cell phone, or in my case, how quickly I might get lost in Greenwood Cemetery without any of those things. Before colonization, Brooklyn and the area that makes up the cemetery was inhabited by various autonomous groups of Lenape Indigenous peoples. I am curious to explore in a future article the way the Lenape learned to move across the land.

This reminds me of a book by M.R. O’Connor, called “Wayfinding.” In it, O’Connor discusses how, before modern instruments and maps, people all around the world used descriptive place names, detailed stories, and their memories (among other strategies) to successfully find their way around their environment. In this discussion, O’Connor explores a concept from Australian Aboriginal culture referred to by anthropologists as “The Dreaming.” I think my words will be inadequate to convey its full meaning, as The Dreaming is famously difficult for outsiders to define or understand, but we can make a beginning. In one sense, the Dreaming is an extremely detailed system of songs and stories where mythical beings created our earth’s landmarks: rivers, watering holes, hills, valleys, even the presence of a particular group of trees in a particular location. The stories describe the relationships and boundaries between different groups of Aboriginal people, even across languages—and describe the long travel routes to move between these groups. But the Dreaming is still ongoing. It’s not just something that happened in the past.

O’Connor quotes Robyn Davidson, a young woman who travelled across the Australian desert by camel, to touch on some of the less concrete aspects of the Dreaming. Ms. Davidson wrote of the Dreaming as “a spiritual realm which saturates the visible world with meaning; that it is the matrix of being; that it was the time of creation; that it is a parallel universe which may be contacted via the ritual performance of song, dance, and painting; that it is a network of stories of mythological heroes—the forerunners and creators of contemporary man.” The Aboriginal people passed these stories on with extreme accuracy over thousands of years. Places carried deep meaning and people knew the stories so well that even when traveling through a new area, maps were unnecessary.

There are no parallels between the Dreaming and our family’s poke around Greenwood Cemetery, but maybe we can write a song about our adventure. Maybe we will find a landmark along our route to remember and pass on. Maybe it’s a 14-foot-tall, young American persimmon tree with small orange fruits.

We walked through Greenwood Cemetery in mid-October and found a young American persimmon tree, loaded with ripe persimmons. Not as picturesque as the Asian persimmons you can find at the grocery store, the orange-ish, yellow-ish American persimmon gets wrinkled and sometimes a little brown when it’s at its peak ripeness. The fruit is a little smaller than the smallest plum you might find. It has a few large seeds in each small fruit. And to really give you the hard sell, if you try one before it’s ripe, it will create an unpleasant, chalky sensation all over your mouth. However, eaten ripe, they have a pleasant, creamy texture and a sweet, delicious taste, perfect for fall and winter recipes and spices. A fully ripe persimmon should detach from the tree with a very light tug or shake of the branch, or it will already be on the ground.

We made a persimmon puree after bringing some fruit home. We have a food mill to help with that process, but before we got a mill, we used a spoon to push the ripe flesh through a colander or strainer, leaving the seeds and most of the skin behind. The puree is delicious enough on its own to be worth the effort. It also freezes very well.

For this project, we went the extra step to create a persimmon butter. We added a bit of cinnamon, brown sugar, a dash of vanilla, a dash of lemon juice, and heated it all in a pan to get everything to meld together.

Then we found a recipe for thumbprint cookies that we liked and instead of jelly, used the persimmon butter. The cookies were nothing too flashy with the brown dabs of persimmon butter in their middles. But they were delicious and provided a fine ending to our family adventure with the 14-foot-tall American persimmon tree, somewhere in Greenwood Cemetery.