Rachel Laudan

A clutch of tejocotes (te-ho-COT-es) with a plum tomato by their side to give you a sense of scale.  They look like minature golden apples, don’t they? Doll’s apples.

So it’s a little sad that when you bite into one, it’s really not great.  Woolly not crisp, fairly tasteless.

Here’s one I’ve nibbled and you can see that this is not a miniature crunchy apple.

So what are these things?  They’re Crataegus mexicana (sometimes pubescens though that’s not the scientifically correct name), part of the hawthorn family that I was so familiar with growing up in England.  There we children always nibbled on the red fruits of hawthorn but they were only about the size of blueberries with a big stone in the middle, so the pithy fruit yielded little beyond satisfying the curiosity.

In fact, the Mexican species is one of the few that yields fruits of economic interest. And I have a soft spot for them even though they’re in a different league from peaches and raspberries and mangoes.

I find something so mundane somehow reassuring after all the foodie hype about the perfect you fill in the gap–strawberry, tomato, peach.  These have always been the tip of the fruit and vegetable iceberg, so to speak.

Most often people ate humble fruits, forgotten in the world of modern marketing.  A friend of mine who grew up on a remote hacienda where near self-sufficiency was the goal told me that preserved tejocotes were the fruit for much of the winter.

And that’s the way they are still usually eaten, peeled and preserved in a heavy syrup with a hint of canela (true cinnamon).

Here are some that I bought in a plastic tub in the market last week.  You can see the cinnamon and the fork is the tiny kind.  And my stark modernist tendencies have been overridden once more and the tub is on this intricate and beautiful mat hand made not far from here.  Well, that’s the soft sell for Mexican needlecraft.

I’ve been eating these for breakfast and, could it be that it’s the cinnamon and the sugar? but they are transformed into something more than palatable, verging on delicious.  Of course, you do a lot of spitting out because each one has three or sometimes more seeds inside.

But imagine on a remote hacienda a row of glass jars with these gleaming golden balls in the pantry.

And the syrup is thick, thick because whatever else tejocotes do or don’t have in their favor, they are loaded with pectin.  They are a standard ingredient for the Mexican Christmas ponche (punch) to which they add color floating around and an unctuousness that the other ingredients just don’t.  In fact they are so rich in pectin that they are grown just to extract the pectin.

And need I say that they crop up in many other typically Mexican uses: as an ate, a fruit cheese, and caramelized like toffee apples.  Oh joy.  And the ones in syrup make magnificent decorations for sophisticated desserts and there’s no way that I can be the only person who uses them that way (pity about the seeds, of course).

And then, today, driving the 50 mile stretch from Mexico City to Guanajuato, high, dry country, all along the verges and the median strip from Tula to San Juan del Rio, these golden balls dangling from their spiky big bushes or small trees, leafless now, just the golden fruits and below them the ground scattered with golden fruits, people with sacks gathering this semi-wild harvest.

And gold plastered on gold, the banks glowing with golden marigolds, the cars on their way to the cemetary loaded with crimson amaranth and more marigolds.

Wish I could have taken a photograph for you, but suicidal stops on the highway, well no.

But really, El Dorado.