So much for my English degree. I came across medlars, or Mespilus germanica, at the farmers’ market this week, a fruit that was new to me but very familiar to Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Cervantes, and Rabelais. Its Wikipedia page reads like a syllabus for the Western canon. The medlar was popular among so many dead white writers in part because it’s only edible after it’s bletted, which means you have wait until it rots, which some scribblers saw as a metaphor for prostitution.
Get it? It’s because they look like buttholes.
Word on the street is that they taste like apple butter, and beyond squishing them straight into your pie hole, you can make jelly, jam, and medlar cheese, a kind of custardy dessert straight out of the Middle Ages.
