The kiwi fruit is useless in the kitchen

It seems this will be a good year for the California kiwi crop. Excuse me for not getting too excited. I’ve never felt a joy within, a sense sublime at what is just a hairy, swollen ball, tough-skinned and acid-fleshed. Kiwis are among the more curious fruits: While there’s the pithy citrus family, while the peach is the fuzzy cousin of the nectarine, while apples and pears offer comparable joys, while the merry cherry seems to me different only in degree from, say, a plum or a grape, there’s nothing remotely like the kiwi. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, they call it “qy gu”, which means strange or unusual fruit, a clever half-transliteration of the old Maori word.

These fruits take several decades to ripen in the fruit bowl, fanned by wailing flies, and when they do, their flesh is never as sweet as you want it to be. The texture is off too: pellet-hard when underripe, always mushy when “ready”. And the stench of overripe kiwi flesh is beyond appalling, a nostril-cloaking fug reeking of sulphur, death and badger poop, putrescence and ancient slime. Have you ever tasted a kiwi fruit, raised the floppy flesh from the hacked brown salad and proclaimed it as one of the most delicious things on Earth? I know no one who calls it their favourite fruit. The sweet sting of an early raspberry, the heralded reach for the peach — they mark the year and the season. Never so the kiwi.

Millennia of obscurity
A triumph of modern marketing — the kiwi fruit. It’s native to China and existed for many millennia in complete and deserved obscurity around the upstream areas of the Yangtze and in Sichuan. The sensible Chinese never incorporated the fruit into their cuisine: For most of its history, mhu to, or macaque peach, featured only in tonics for children or for women after childbirth. We have a teacher and missionary named Mary Isabel Fraser to thank for our knowledge of it. After a trip to China in 1903, Fraser introduced the seeds to her native New Zealand, mistakenly naming the fruit yang tao, which is, in fact, the carambola. Her country had its first crop in 1910.

The chosen few
The kiwi was a curio until the Second World War, grown only by a few households in New Zealand. The most common and hardiest cultivar, the Hayward (no relation), emerged in 1924 and by the early 1940s the fruit had assumed the name “Chinese gooseberry”. It was briefly and horrifyingly known as the “melonette” in the 1950s, a name of such horror, it chills one’s bones. The French still call it “souris vgtale” or vegetable mouse, which is much more appealing.

However, during the late 1950s in the US, the Chinese gooseberry carried a regrettable Cold War stigma, while melons were subject to notorious import tariffs. When the American buyer asked for a new name, the New Zealand producers suggested “kiwi fruit”, after the country’s national bird (supposedly good to eat but don’t mention that in Auckland). The new term stuck.

The kiwi’s heyday was surely the 1960s and the 1970s, when it basked and revelled as the favoured garnish of nouvelle cuisine, that revolution in French food, which did eventually disappear into its own fruiting cluster. I can’t help feeling that the kiwi’s popularity back then was derived more from its rarity and its vaguely exotic look than from any enjoyable flavour. Although in the early 1980s, only 5 per cent of American households had heard of it, by 1986, the fruit was in 84 per cent of American supermarkets. Alas for the kiwi, its vogue was short-lived. Production peaked in New Zealand in 1988 before swiftly declining and Italy now harvests the most. Global sales seem to be increasing again as new markets emerge in places such as India and Russia but I wonder whether the people there too will soon grow tired of the dun, hairy drupe.

Useless beauty
I admit that a slice of kiwi is a pretty thing, the black seeds bursting from the puckered centre, the livid swoosh of ectoplasm. But it’s useless in the kitchen. The New Zealand-based kiwi fruit marketing board Zespri offers drab recipes such as yoghurt whip and “kid’s kiwi fruit cone”.

Larousse Gastronomique has two recipes for kiwi fruit. One is a fruit salad, the other meat chops with kiwi fruit sauce. Between them, they evoke an unmistakable sense of barrel-scraping desperation.

Kiwi doesn’t even want to go with other foods. Like pineapples and papayas, its flesh contains actinidin. This enzyme is handy for the food industry because it tenderises proteins and makes meat easier to digest but it’s also a strong allergen that can cause people to go into anaphylactic shock. Actinidin renders raw kiwi useless in milk-based desserts because the enzyme breaks down milk proteins. Nor can you make jelly from it.

People took to the kiwi because of its novelty and attractive appearance, not because of its taste. It’s the Duracell bunny of the fruit world, fluffy and fun but full of something corrosive.

Perhaps I would see things differently if I went to New Zealand or Italy and had a fresh one that hadn’t sustained months of cold storage such as the brown globes in supermarkets. But I don’t think so.