Asian Pears

It's been a week of pears. I've eaten two or three everyday. And, except for olives, and grapefruit, they are my favorite fruit. But the truth is that I have eaten asian pears only this week, and they have been a revelation. Unlike the desireable full wine filled succulence of a brown skinned bosc pear when it is really ready to be eaten, which has historically been my clean toothpick test for fruit goodness, asian pears, as near as I can tell, are crisp like apples, but still terrifically succulent.
Pears enter my life as a child, in the canned and sandily textured syruped pear that was like a fruit coctail fruit. And they remind me of Lagoon and the long set of colorful slides that were there near the north end in 1975. I ate a can there for lunch with some friends when I was eight. And they were terrific. Which is a good thing for food to be at Lagoon when you are a kid. My experience being that whatever you ate there, you were going to meet again going the other way when you vomited in the parking lot before going home. Which I believe I did every time I went there, except as a senior in High School. And that is probably becasue I was an tricyclic antidepressents in high school which made everything so bland and tired that vomiting seemed a bit of a drag.
I think my next awakening encounter with pears was when I was an assistant clinical medical librarian at the University Of Utah. I love hospitals and I love hospital food. And the U's hospital had almost year round, a great pear selection. It was almost impossible to get a bad one. They were almost always russet skinned bosc pears that looked a little sad. But they ate like candy. I probably ate one almost every time I worked for six years. I stained many tee shirts with the teltale brown drip of pear juice.
I recall hearing about asian pears from friends who had gone to Manhattan, one on a romatic quest, and one on a punk literary quest, but in each case, an asian pear appears in the narrative of a special evening. And oddly enough, in each the pear is eaten on a roof top while looking over the city.
But for me, they were always the obscure, expensive fruit which seemed to come in a burn unit dressing of criscrossed rubber and plastic. Too fru fru for a lowbrow consumer like me, so one has to consider the pure numbers of asian pears that have crossed the doorstep to my gut this week.
First, my resturant manager brought in a half bushel of the treasures the other night and stuck them in the walkin. I had one, and it was hard and bad and not ripe. So...
The next night I had one, hoping for better, and it was simply marvlous. It has the wine like richness of a juicy squichy pear, but the crisp bite of an fuji apple, and it was hugely sweet, like flowers would be sweet, if they were sweet to the taste and not the nose. I've been eating them like crazy now at work, probably three a night. And have been trying to find them. Now, Salt Lake City, is a funny place, and I haven't tried some of the pricy small botique stores, but I have shopped wild oats, which had a sad and sloppy selection of only two asian pears, smiths, which had no asian pears at all, and wallmart -- heaven forfend -- which had two varieties of asian pear, both for only a dollar and a quarter a piece, much cheaper than wild oats, and they were simply out of this world delicious. I've had so so luck with walmart's produce, but here they smoke the competition.