Knowledge of the Durian
Durians are large, spiky, strongly flavoured fruits produced by trees in the genus Durio, native to Sumatra, Borneo, and mainland Southeast Asia. Across this region the fruit is a popular snack, usually enjoyed while fresh and not too long off the tree. (The English pirate William Dampier (2007[1697]:46) noted that the fruit ‘will not keep above a day or two before it putrefies and turns black or a dark colour, and then it is not good’.) The fruit can also be fermented and used in cooking, and these days one can find a range of durian-flavoured candies, chocolates, juices, and ice lollies as well.
Outside Southeast Asia the durian is probably best known for its odour. Western journalists seem incapable of discussing durians for more than a line or so without calling the fruit ‘smelly’ or ‘stinky’. While I probably wouldn’t want to be stuck on a train with one for too long, I have to say that it doesn’t smell all that bad to me — and not all foreigners have been put off by its aroma in the past. Dampier, the aforementioned pirate, said that the durian ‘sends forth an excellent Scent’ (emphasis added).
‘Durian’ is a Malay word meaning ‘thorny one’ — duri ‘thorn’, from proto-Austronesian *duRi, with the suffix -an — because the outer rind is covered in spikes (Figure 1). The word appears in the ninth-century Old Javanese kakawin Rāmāyaṇa (8.10) — presumably the earliest surviving reference to the fruit in any text. (I’m not sure about that, though, so take it with a pinch of salt, and the kakawin is in any case preserved in manuscripts of much later date.) Durians aren’t native to Java, and the word for them appears to have been loaned from Malay to Old Javanese in the form duryan. The Old Javanese word for ‘thorn’ is rwi (from the same proto-Austronesian source), so duryan is unlikely to be a native Javanese formulation.
In this post, anyway, I’d like to look at one fifteenth-century Italian traveller’s comments on the durian. These comments appear in two texts, one written by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini in around 1448 and another — a caption on a map — written in Venice in around 1450. Both texts seem to record the travels and experiences of Niccolò de’ Conti, a Venetian merchant who travelled around the Indian Ocean in the early/mid fifteenth century with his Egyptian wife and children. (Conti has appeared on the blog before, incidentally.)
Not many fresh fruits from tropical Asia were known in medieval Europe, for obvious reasons, and these seem to be the earliest known European descriptions of the durian. It is notable that the Malay word is recorded precisely as durian in both cases. The two descriptions are different — they are, indeed, in different languages — and they focus on slightly different aspects of the fruit, but they reinforce one another and do appear to have come from ultimately the same description by the same person. It may even be possible to identify the precise species of durian Conti encountered by combining the two descriptions, as I suggest below.
Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò de’ Conti
The first text here is taken from the fourth book of Poggio Bracciolini’s De Varietate Fortunæ, a work on life and luck written in Latin in 1448. The entirety of the fourth book is devoted to Conti’s travels, which were narrated to Bracciolini by the man himself after his return to Italy in 1444, brought about by the deaths of his wife and two of his children from plague in Egypt.
The description of the durian occurs in Conti/Bracciolini’s account of Sumatra, known in the text as both Sciamutera (somewhat accurately rendering the name of the Samudra-Pasai Sultanate in the north of the island) and Trapobana (derived from the Greek name for Sri Lanka through a series of misunderstandings). I have taken the text here from f.44v of Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.lat.224, a manuscript copied in 1460 (Figure 2). The section in question corresponds to lines 140–142 in the 2004 edition by Michèle Guéret-Laferté.
TEXT
[…] fructum uiridem habent nomine durianum ma-
gnitudine cucumeris, in quo sunt quinꝙ ueluti mala arancia oblonga ua-
rii saporis instar butiri coagulati.
TRANSLATION
‘They have a green fruit the size of a melon called the durian, inside of which are five fruits each like a long orange of varied flavour, (with a texture) like thick butter.’
The Fra Mauro Map
The description in Bracciolini’s text is well known — almost as well known as Alfred Russel Wallace’s (see below) — and you can even find it on the English Wikipedia page for the durian. Less celebrated, however, is the description of the fruit that occurs in the caption on Taprobana (i.e. Conti’s Sumatra) on the Fra Mauro map, a world map made by the Camaldolese monk and cartographer Fra Mauro in the middle of the fifteenth century (Figure 3). The map was probably finished in 1459, and it can be found today in the Library of St Mark (Biblioteca Marciana) in Venice.
The description of the durian on the Fra Mauro map is a little different to the one in Bracciolini’s text, but it nonetheless seems likely that Conti was responsible for both. Conti was Venetian, like the eponymous Fra Mauro; he was certainly in Italy c.1450; and plenty of the other captions can be traced to him as well. The fact that the map’s captions are in the Venetian language may account for their relative obscurity, although complete transcriptions and English translations have in fact been published (see Falchetta 2006).
The Taprobana caption is 0023 in Falchetta’s numbering. Here’s what it has to say about durians, beginning on the fourth line from the top:
TEXT
e qui nasce ĩ arbori uno fruto chiamado duriã. e de grandeça de una raso-
neuel anguria e ha el scorço uerde e gropoloso chome la pigna et ha dẽ-
tro .ve. fructi chada uno de grãdeça de una rasoneuel pigna e chada uno de
questi ve fructi hano differente suauita de sapor. e sono dẽtro de colo᷈
paonaço e sono molto calidi.
TRANSLATION
‘[…] and growing in the trees is a fruit called the durian. It is the size of a standard watermelon and has a rind which is green and spiky like a pine cone, and it has inside five fruits, each the size of a standard pine cone, and each one of these five fruits has different subtleties of flavour. And on the inside they are purple, and they are very hot.’
It’s notable that Conti here says that the pulp is purple (paonaço). While durians come in a wide range of different colours (see here for some nice pictures), and while Durio zibethinus, the species most commonly sold, does indeed have varietals with reddish pulp, I would like to suggest suggest that the description here fits best with Durio graveolens, also known as the red-fleshed durian.
Combining the two descriptions, Conti’s durian had flavourful purple flesh as firm as thick butter, and Conti does not appear to have focused on the fruit’s odour as many new to the fruit are wont to do; D. graveolens is noted for the firmness of its purple flesh and for its relatively subtle scent. The spikes on the rind of D. graveolens fruits are also rather long and thick and do resemble somewhat the exteriors of pine cones. On top of that, the species grows in Sumatra (‘Taprobana’), which is where Conti says he encountered the durian.
That identification isn’t certain, of course, and do bear in mind that I’m not a botanist. (I just like plants.)
Anyway, it’s unsurprising that Conti/Mauro thought durians to be ‘hot’ (calidi) in terms of their basic qualities. They do after all have a strong and exciting flavour, typical of ‘hot’ foods (lettuce being a typical example of a ‘cold’ food’). You certainly know when you’re eating one.
I will leave you with the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s evocative description of the flavour of the durian, originally published in an essay of 1856 but here taken from the copy of The Malay Archipelago that I happen to have on my shelf (2008[1890]:57–58):
‘… its consistency and flavour are indescribable. A rich butter-like custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it come wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, brown sherry, and other incongruities. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid, nor sweet, nor juicy, yet one feels the want of none of these qualities, for it is perfect as it is. 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.’
A. J. West — Leiden, May 2020
REFERENCES
Dampier, William. 2007 (1697). Piracy, turtles & flying foxes. London: Penguin.
Falchetta, Piero. 2006. Fra Mauro’s world map. Turnhout: Brepols.
Guéret-Laferté, Michèle. 2004. De l’Inde. Les voyages en Asia de Niccolò de’ Conti. Turnhout: Brepols.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 2008 [1890]. The Malay Archipelago. Singapore: Periplus Classics.
