The Honey Apple
The quinces had been sitting in a bowl on the kitchen table for four days, and by the end of the week the entire room smelled of them. It is a remarkable smell — floral, honeyed, faintly tropical, somewhere between an apple, a pear, and an expensive candle — and it fills a space the way no other fruit I know quite manages. Guests kept asking what it was. I kept gesturing proudly at the bowl. The quinces sat there, golden and downy and glowing, looking for all the world like the most delicious things ever to occur in nature. Reader, I bit one. I would like to say I was young and foolish, but I was neither. I simply could not believe that something that looked like that, and smelled like that, could possibly be as advertised by the various people who had warned me. Surely, I thought, the rawness was overstated. Surely one small, exploratory bite of this radiant golden fruit would reward me with something like the perfume made solid. What I got instead was a mouthful of what I can on...
