In the middle of the 14th century, on a journey through India, the Florence-born friar Giovanni de’ Marignolli came across a fruit he’d never seen. It was “as big as a great lamb, or a child of 3 years old,” he wrote. “You have to cut it open with a hatchet.” The reward was “a pulp of surpassing flavor, with the sweetness of honey, and” — a pang of homesickness? — “of the best Italian melon.”
The object of his desire: jackfruit, as it came to be known in English, most likely from chakka, its name in the Malayalam language. But despite the good friar’s enthusiasm, in the centuries that followed, jackfruit never quite won a place in the hearts and kitchens of the West. Unlike fellow tropical fruits, like the banana (“the most delicious thing in the world,” Benjamin Disraeli, a future British prime minister, declared in 1831) and the pineapple (“a pleasure bordering on pain,” the English essayist Charles Lamb rhapsodized in 1888), it remains beloved mostly by those who live where it grows.
Recipe: Jackfruit Tacos
Perhaps to outsiders, it appears forbidding. Its reptilian hide evokes the flank of a dormant dragon. Its fragrance when ripe is, how shall we say, strong. (Like the durian, it has been banned from airplane cabins.) Then, too, there is the issue of its unwieldy size. The jackfruit is a giant: the largest fruit borne by trees. The heaviest specimen on record, documented in the western Indian state Maharashtra in 2016, measured nearly two feet long and more than four feet around, and weighed 94 pounds 2.9 ounces, according to the Guinness World Book of Records. Rivals for the title include a 144-pounder reportedly sighted at a jackfruit festival in the southern Indian state Kerala in 2010.
Kerala is where the American poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil first tasted jackfruit, at age 8. She was visiting her paternal grandparents, whom she knew through the carefully typed aerogrammes they mailed her every few months. Their neighbors didn’t quite know what to make of this half-Indian, half-Filipino girl from Chicago, who had bobbed hair and wore shorts and pink glasses (“too much reading,” her mother explained). Then they watched her devour jackfruit and understood that she was one of them after all.
