Butter Fruit

When Marks and Spencers first started selling the avocado in the 1960s  they labelled it the ‘avocado pear’, so customers bought the strange little thing, took it home and tried to eat it as a pudding with custard. The supermarket got so many complaints that the dropped the ‘pear’. Botanically the avocado is a large berry. And a tomato is a fruit. But you wouldn’t put it in a fruit salad.

For the Aztecs the avocado is a symbol of fertility, but if an avocado got up and walked across the table to me I don’t think it would walk with a pregnant sway; I imagine it would be more like an old man with leathery, alligator skin, short legs and a gloomy temperament like Eeyore.

When held in the hand the ripe avocado yields to gentle pressure, like butter. It would seem a novelty for the avocado to appear in a sweet dish, but countries like Brazil find it strange that we use the avocado in savoury dishes; for there it is used to make milkshakes and ice creams. Cooking the flesh can turn render it inedible but just the other day I came across I a key lime pie made from of avocado. It’s slimier than the creamy original, but it has a satisfying density and fresh limey zing. And I didn’t feel reminded of guacamole.