The return of the long lost loquat
After a four-year absence, my favorite foraged fruit is back. And with it, memories of other seasons of life.
Today, I had my first loquat since 2020. That’s four years without my favorite foraged fruit.
Let’s recap: Loquats, Eriobotrya japonica, or Japanese plum, are a popular landscape tree in Austin. They have dark, waxy, elongated leaves with a light fuzz. The yellowish-orange fruits have a large seeded center, but the skin is thin enough that you can eat it or easily peel it to get to the peachy flesh inside.
I think there are two kinds of people: People who love loquats and people who don’t know about them. I’ve heard there are people who hate loquats because they “make a mess on the driveway,” but those people should just call me and I’ll take care of their excess loquat problem.
I’ve been fairly obsessed with loquats since eating them during my year in Spain in college. Called nisperos, the baseball-sized loquats sold throughout southern Spain are in season through mid-summer, but the golf ball-sized ones of Austin are typically ready in April.
I used to write about them nearly every year when I was a food writer at the local newspaper. (The last loquat story I wrote was in September of 2020, when a local herbalist launched a free community effort called Project Loquat, where she made teas and tinctures — using donated funds and supplies — to give away loquat leaf medicine that is good for the respiratory system. Talk about the gift economy...)
But Austin hasn’t had loquats in years. We had our first snowpocalypse in February 2021, followed by another in 2023, and the local loquat trees didn’t recover enough to bear fruit in the year between.
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But this year, I’ve seen them on trees for the first time since the first year of COVID, which is hard to believe. On one of my dog walks this morning, I noticed that the fruits were starting to turn yellow. I didn’t think any of them would be ready, but when I got closer, I saw one with the lightest hint of orange. I twisted the fruit, and it fell off easily into my hand.
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