I've posted about my old standbys in Chinatown, but I did manage to try something completely new while I was there. On the corner of Mott and Bayard, there's a little fruit stand displaying, among other more pedestrian items, a row of spiky brown globes hanging off hooks in yellow nets. I've come here to buy my first durian.

Is this some strange weapon left over from the rough-and-tumble days of the Five Points? One can certainly imagine a drunken thug tearing through a gangland brawl, braining his enemies with a durian attached to a chain. But no, durian is actually a fruit, native to Southeast Asia, that ranks with the mangosteen as among the most celebrated plants in the culinary pantheon. Just as the mangosteen is considered the queen of fruits, durian is hailed as their king.

The most often mentioned characteristic of the durian is its smell. Even people who love it above all other foods admit that it usually has an "off" odor. Hotels and public buildings across Southeast Asia post conspicuous signs banning the fruit from their premises. Less charitable gastronomes make no bones about it: durian just plain stinks. But if something can smell so foul, and yet still evoke paroxysms of pleasure in its broad and devoted following, it must taste pretty friggin good. So I ponied up the royal fee of five dollars American for one of these skull crushers, and gingerly toted it back to the Upper West Side.

When I got my first durian home, the first thing I did was open up all the windows. I couldn't detect any odor from the unopened fruit, but I had heard that once you break the skin of a durian its smell floods the air. Durians are usually opened with a machete, but those are hard to come by in the genteel West 70s, so I sharpened up my slightly less menacing cleaver. Bracing myself, I hacked away, fully expecting to be overpowered by a stench somewhere between that of an open sewer and a week-old dead body.

My durian smelled of neither. Perhaps this is a result of dislocation from its native land: I understand that durians harvested for sale abroad are of a special variety that can be picked before they are ripe, that they are frozen for transport, and that both of these treatments diminish its odor (and, many claim, its flavor). That is not to say that the smell was pleasant: it was faintly reminiscent of a gas leak. But it was certainly manageable. More off-putting is the tactile experience of opening a durian. Its hard, almost bony exterior yields to a forceful blow from a sharp instrument, revealing the durian's soft, cream-colored flesh. I was reminded of a line from the Simpsons:

[Kent Brockman]: Professor ... would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

[Professor]: Yes I would, Kent.

Anthropomorphisms aside, I was able to scoop out the durian's flesh and separate it from the leathery, coral-colored seeds that lie at the center of each segment.

So how does durian taste? For me, the most striking part of the experience of eating durian is its texture. It really is like eating custard. The similarity is almost creepy. I imagine that in a region where dairy products are scarce to nonexistent, the sensation of creaminess must go a long way in raising the popularity of a foodstuff, even one that smells bad and is separated from the consumer by rows of sharp spikes. In this respect the durian is remarkably similar to another Eastern delicacy: the sea urchin. Personally, I would just as soon whip up some egg yolks and milk.

The flavor itself was understated: faintly reminiscent of bananas, mildly sweet, but with the lingering undertones of that gas-leak smell and an oily rubbing-alcohol note that I believe many Western durian-tasters equate with the sharpness of raw garlic. I know that my Bayard Street durian is probably a poor representative of the species that is traditionally eaten as soon as possible after it spontaneously drops off the tree in a Siamese jungle, but it just didn't do much for me. I couldn't eat more than one segment's worth of flesh, and tossed the rest.

As a post-script, I later learned that durian is considered in Eastern medicinal traditions to be an extremely "hot" food, i.e., it falls into the "yang" side of the "yin-yang" balance. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that durian eaters avoid other "yang-y" foods, especially alcohol. I wish I had known this before I washed the king of fruits down with the king of beers. I suffered from some wicked indigestion the whole night.