Winter Lights

Luminous, sweet persimmons are first among fruits in Mitchell, Indiana.

By Peggy Knickerbocker

Credit: Laurie Smith

For many Americans, the persimmon is a curiosity, one of those little-known fruits that sit ornamentally on the supermarket shelf yet rarely make it into the shopping basket. But in Mitchell, Indiana, a small town set amid limestone hills about eighty miles south of Indianapolis, it's a different story. People here are crazy for the fruit—and not the large, juicy, commonly available oriental variety, either, but the native American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana), which is not much bigger than a walnut and which grows on literally thousands of trees in and around the town. (The native persimmon's range stretches from Pennsylvania to Florida and west to Illinois.)

Every fall for the past 54 years, as the persimmons begin ripening around them, the people of Mitchell have thrown a festival to honor their favorite fruit. And the persimmon pudding contest, which caps the celebration, is the culinary event of the year.

Most of the pudding contestants, as I learned when I visited Mitchell in persimmon season not long ago, have a secret—and it's not necessarily their pudding recipe; usually, it's the location of their favorite trees. I even overheard one of the festival's organizers tell a friend, over a persimmon ice cream cone, "My wife would be very unhappy if she knew I'd mentioned that she'd gone out to her parents' property to gather persimmons." Every tree is thought to produce persimmons with a unique quality. Lee Purlee, a Mitchell High School math teacher, won this year's contest using pulp she'd had in her freezer since 1998; it came from a tree in her backyard that has since died. "The fruit on it had a sweet taste, and the pulp was sort of translucent, not thick and gritty like some," she reminisces. When the tree expired, says Purlee, "we went into mourning for a couple of days."

The first person I called on when I arrived in Mitchell was Dymple Green, the town's unofficial persimmon queen. Green, a former bookkeeper who has worn her hair in the same bouffant style since she and her husband, Vernon, began processing persimmon pulp and freezing it for local sale 32 years ago, knows more about native American persimmons than just about anyone else in town.

"In order to make sure the persimmons are ripe, you have to pick them up off the ground," she explained (that is, they have to be mature enough to have fallen on their own). "Otherwise they'll be puckery." In fact, when I drove up to the Greens' house, Vernon, a retired wallboard production supervisor, was painstakingly collecting fallen persimmons from under the trees surrounding their tidy white farmhouse—dressed in painter's disposable coveralls, since native persimmons stain anything they touch. Vernon processes the persimmons by feeding them through an electric mill in an immaculate workroom, formerly their son's pony stable. The resulting pulp is frozen in one-pound lots and sold under the label Dymple's Delight. But the pulp isn't sold in grocery stores; you buy it directly from the Greens—just knock on their back door.

As we left the room, I noticed an autographed picture of former vice president Dan Quayle, an Indiana native, smiling down from above a large freezer. "He was very polite," recalled Dymple. "He wrote us a darling thank-you note for a case of persimmon pulp."