Leaving my classes each afternoon, the hot stench of durian fruit and motorbike fumes greet me and keep me company all the way home. Equally horrible, but in different ways. Motorbike fumes: a dull pain, and dismal struggle for the lungs and throat; durian triggering a deep, personal revulsion. Everyone agrees that motorbike fumes are oppressive, but durian is different. For every righteous admonisher, there is an equally ardent champion. While most despise durian, some absolutely adore it. Its status was mystical, reports insisting that the taste was indescribable. There are even reportedly numerous durian-related deaths recorded each year. I was curious in the face of this ferocious love, hate, and potential danger. I couldn’t help but wonder – was the durian misunderstood? What’s behind this infamous fruit qui pue, fruit qui tue?*

Mark Twain seems to have pondered in a similar vein, his description captures the glamour and mystique of the curious fruit to Western travellers of yore:

By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparable delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a durian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment. We found many who had eaten the Dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture. They said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the ring before the fruit was in your mouth, you would faint. There is a fortune in that rind. Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for cheese […] There was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the durian was never in evidence. It was never the season for the durian. It was always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other, but it never did.

Back in the present day, the durian is apparently nicknamed the “king of fruits” (though I’ve never actually heard anyone use this term). This is probably due to its daunting size it can grow up to 30 centimetres or three kilograms and offensive exterior (green or brown with large, bulbous spikes on the outside, in contrast to its soft and fleshy innards). To accentuate its bad boy rep, the durian is commonly banned from hotel rooms, and is even forbidden on the Singapore Rapid Mass Transit. The smell of the fruit is the key to its incendiary effect. Food writer Richard Sterling describes the smell as “pig shit, turpentine and onions garnished with a dirty gym sock.” Somewhat dramatically, a university campus in Melbourne was actually evacuated this year, due to a rotten durian fruit in a cupboard being taken for a gas leak.

The taste is also contentious. Food journalist Andrew Zimmern likens the taste to “completely rotten onions” while writer Anthony Burgess describes the experience as “like eating raspberry blancmange in the lavatory.” The durian has even evoked the wrath of, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, who serenely disses the fruit, writing:

If you were to say to me, “Thay, I love you so much I would like you to eat some of this durian.” I would suffer. You love me, you want me to be happy, but you force me to eat durian. That is an example of love without understanding. Your intention is good, but you don’t have to correct understanding.

The strength of feeling of the haters, however, is equaled by those who love the durian to the ends of the earth. Ernest Darch’s memoir depicting his time in a Japanese internment camp includes a long and detailed description the place of durian at the camps. It’s sounds as if he likes the fruit, but is ashamed to do so, describing “the truly wonderful, but indescribable taste, approaching nearest to a concoction of a banana and sweetened condensed milk with a haunting flavour that might be onions but which is not.” He makes the durian sound like a shameful succumbing to otherness akin to visiting an opium den, writing that “Europeans never eat them normally, except when out of contact with them countrymen or at special durian parties.” According to their accounts, many Westerner men of this era were particularly impartial to the stuff. E.J. Banfield described, in 1911, how he had been “spending a small fortune in durians,” going on to describe the ecstasy that is the durian:

Like all the good things in Nature – tempests, breakers, sunsets, &c., durian is indescribable. It is meat and drink and an unrivalled delicacy besides, and you may gorge to repletion and never have cause for penitence. It is the one case where Nature has tried her hand at the culinary art and beaten all the CORDON BLEUE out of heaven and earth.

In some the taste of the custard surrounding the heart-like seeds rises almost to the height of passion, rupture, or mild delirium. Yesterday (21st June, 1907) about 2pm, I devoured the contents of a fruit weighing over 10lb. At 6pm I was too sleepy to eat anything, and thence had twelve hours of almost unbroken slumber.

Alfred Russel Wallace appears to have been equally mesmerised, and happily intoxicated, by the lure of the notorious durian:

A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acidic nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience. … as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed.

Continuing the theme of making durian sound like some wonderful, mystic drug, the Revd. H. Howes wrote in 1994 that:

The initial reaction was one of revulsion but those who went on to taste were lost forever, hooked for life. And durian was more than a delicacy: it was a meal in itself, rich in everything the body.

So, while living in this part of the world (Hanoi), I felt compelled to at least taste it. As it turned out, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as I’d first assumed… Having only lived in Hanoi for a few months thus, my language skills still need some work, and I don’t yet have the vocabulary for this particular challenge. Long story short, I ended up spending a stupid amount of time on money on my quest to find a durian to try, not to mention invoking the distress, annoyance and panic of my friends and housemates. One friend’s eyes widened in response to my durian shopping report, as he asked, ‘“Oh God, it’s not here is it?”. All for the sake of art and adventure, eh! I tasted a small mouthful of the flesh from the huge plastic case I’d accidentally purchased. I subscribe to the Thich Nhat Han school of durian dislike. Yes, it’s rich. Yes, it’s custardy. But the strong, pungent, fermented taste and smell are just too powerful for me. Maybe I’m a baby, many I’m a Western idiot, missing out one of the greatest, tastiest moments of my life… but try as I might, I couldn’t face one more morsel of the supposed delicacy. Disappointing.

* Fruit qui pue, fruit qui tue. Translation: fruit that stinks, fruit that kills. This was the title of an article on durian published by French food blog Le Manger.fr.