Japanese Medlars

Writing about the fruits of Thailand reminded me of another fruit from my childhood overseas that I’ve never seen since. My family lived in Tunis when I was in 3rd through 5th grades. We lived in a beautiful house in Carthage that had lemon trees and another fruit tree that bore a fruit I had never heard of before. We discovered they we called medlars (nèfles in French). We would pick the fruit right off the trees and eat it. It is slightly tart but when it’s really ripe it’s sweet and delicious.

I Googled “medlar” and came across this Wikipedia page. But this was definitely not the fruit I remember. All the pages I found about “medlars” did not show the medlars that I remembered. So I did a search on the French word “nèfle” and that set me on the right track. I found information about the Japanese medlar (also called loquat). Yes! This is exactly the fruit we had.

According to the Epicurious food dictionary, “loquats bruise easily so they're not good travelers. For that reason, fresh loquats are usually found only in the regions in which they're grown.” I guess that means I won’t be seeing any Japanese medlars in my New England supermarket.