1.

Quenepas don’t translate, and they’re called by different names depending on the country. If I were writing a chapter on this fruit for a book (say, one called On Eating), I’d have to go digging for everything about these trees and their pulp and their specific pitorro, called bilí, and I’d have to drive down south and maybe fly to Vieques, and I’d have to find multiple sources—secondary, primary—and I’d have to do all of that with enough time to let it sink into my skin so I could write about it properly.

A lot of my next book is about the food reporting, eating, and cooking experience that’s sunk itself fully into my life story: I wouldn’t be me without them. When I read the final copyedited draft, I thought, I have to get out there again. I thought, I’ve been squeezed like juice. I could’ve thought, I’ve been sucked dry like a quenepa.

2.

Quenepas are tropical and don’t travel well, though I’ve bought them out of trucks in Brooklyn before. You wouldn’t know how to eat one by simply looking at them (how many fruits would you know how to eat by looking at them?). It’s easy, though: You just use your teeth to tear off some of the thin green skin and suck on the yellow pulp surrounding a rather large beige seed. Then you spit out the seed. Then you eat another. It’s best that someone gives them to you for free. When I see people start to sell them on the street out of the back of pickup trucks near where tourists congregate, I know to bide my time: Soon enough, I’ll have free fruit. 

3.

During the last season, I stepped outside the house to walk the dog with a branch of quenepas in my hand. One of my husband’s coworkers had brought them in, and he knows I live for tropical fruits—the worse it travels, the better. The dog and I moseyed over to the corner bar, where Benny gets an afternoon treat. A regular stopped me as I puckered my mouth around the pulp of my free fruit: “Uno?” he asked, and I immediately broke him off a green bulb. I wrote this moment down in my journal, because it was the closest I’ve ever felt to being asked whether I have a cigarette and being able to oblige. 

4.

As I write, my mother-in-law comes over to drop off some guineos and yuca en escabeche that she got for me. These are my favorite dishes of comida criolla: guineos are bananas, unripe, cooked with vinegar, herbs, and spices. The same process goes for the yuca. When my mom ate yuca en escabeche for the first time, she opened her eyes wide, because it was so familiar, so much like German potato salad in the notes it hits.

It reminded me of being told to taste a certain fruit or flower (I forget the specifics) at a farm; the photographer on assignment with me, who’d grown up in Puerto Rico, and I had totally different tasting notes for it because our palates had been shaped by different flavors. All I remember is that I said “apple.” When I ate a mangosteen for the first time recently, though, quenepa was one of my references.

5. 

The first chapter in On Eating is about, obviously enough, apples, but I had to do the most research to get it ready: I’d never taken apples all that seriously, and though I’d picked my fair share, I’d not thought enough about how they’re grown or why. This is part of the thinking I was trying to untangle: what we do with the obvious inheritances so basic as to strike us as boring, yet essential to our selves. A lot of work went into making the research seem to quickly sink into me, so that it could take on the ease of the rest of the chapters—smooth moves from personal to political to gastronomical are only possible because the research is as digested as all the fruits, all the mushrooms, all the beans and bread. 

In my essays that I write here, though, I like the immediacy of research and experience to be present; I like to put the energy, the thrill of the hunt, into this work, because I think it makes it more propulsive to read. It takes both approaches to make a body of work.

6.

It’s easier for me, even now, to imagine the roads I’d travel to better understand the quenepa, all the names for it that people might have, than it would be for me to imagine going to the same lengths for apples. The tropical has just always been more special to me, even as it’s disappointed me. I know about passion fruit: parcha in Puerto Rico, chinola in the Dominican Republic, maracuyá basically everywhere else in Latin America (correct me if I’m wrong). Tell me what you call quenepas. I want to do the work; I need more stories to tell, and I need to become the person I’ll be when I’ve done the research.