Feijoas, a small green fruit ripening on Auckland bushes now, are the New Zealand equivalent of cilantro. Like cilantro, the feijoa’s flavor and its perfume are inextricably linked, and like cilantro, people either love them or hate them, looking for unguarded verandahs for drive-by drop-offs if they have feijoa bushes in their yards. Although I think of them as New Zealand fruits, I’m told they are native to South America, like the kumara that became a staple of the Maori diet after one Polynesian sailor or another brought the sweet potato back from his overseas travels.
Yoke, the friend I’m staying with during this part of my visit, weekly lends her kitchen for photo shoots for the New Zealand Herald’s food and style insert. Her daughter is the staff photographer, so I have had fun looking for examples of Yoke’s collection of silverware and serving dishes in the Wednesday paper. This week I got to meet the food editor as she arrived to work up next week’s featured recipes – all involving feijoas delivered by the newly hired PR person for the Feijoa Grower’s Association, the long-lost friend of Yoke’s whom she had run into just the week before in our weekly community choir practices, but that’s a whole other Auckland small world story.
Although I can riff on recipes, I don’t have the palate or food imagination to think of combining food flavors I have haven’t yet tasted together. So when Amanda told me about the feijoa, smoked fish, and Vietnamese mint salad she was making for this week’s shoot, and confessed she’d never made it before but was confident “it would be lovely,” I knew I was out of my depth. She also made feijoa jam, stewed feijoas and cream (which reminded me of the Rosalind Russel line from “My Sister Eileen,” when she reads the recommendation on the back of a free cereal box: “Tastes delicious with peaches and cream,” and then asks, “What doesn’t?”), and feijoa fruit salad with green and red guavas.
The selection of tropical fruit that’s now in season – feijoa, guava, passion fruit—has contributed to the summery taste of my stay. It’s lovely to leave Portland in March, when I’m sick of apples and pears and bananas, and arrive in time for the last of the stone fruit and berry season, along with the harvest of passion fruit and feijoas. It’s also good to know the Hood strawberry season will be arriving soon after I return. Like the feijoa, putting down roots in South American and the South Pacific, I am happy to enjoy the best of both my worlds.