It’s mid April and my house is full of bags of loquats, called “shesek” in Hebrew, from a couple of friends’ trees. Loquat trees bare lots of fruit which ripen nearly all at once, so anyone who has a tree has to eat all the fruit quickly or find plenty of friends to give their fruit away to if they want to avoid wasting all that great food.
I asked my friends what you could do with loquats, and they all kind of looked at me funny. “You eat them!”
I said, “Do you make loquat pies? Jellies? Syrups?”
“Nah. That’s too much work. You have to get the seeds out and stuff. It wouldn’t be worth it. You just pick the fruit and eat it fresh.” One of my friends explained.
But, that seemed like such a silly, too-modern answer to me. No one a hundred years ago would let a perfectly good fruit like the loquat go to waste just because you couldn’t eat the fresh fruit fast enough. There had to be other things that were done to the fruit to make the harvest last longer, to preserve the fruit, or to make it more palatable when you find yourself gorging on a near mono-diet of last week’s harvest. A little bit of research was valuable, however.
First off, it might be that there weren’t any loquats in Israel 100 or so years ago, since some varieties of the tree were imported from California and Spain and others were intentionally developed here. That might explain the lack of a local repertoire loquat dishes.
On the other hand, the tree is native to China, and the Chinese figured out not only a number of recipes for these fruit, but also some medicinal uses. Loquats are actually great in jellies and jams because of their high pectin content. Like apples, they can be used to make a jelly or syrup that is mainly another fruit jell better. They are great in fruit salads or fruit cups, and you can make pies with them, too. If you eat a lot of the fruit, they have a gentle sedative effect that lasts for 24 hours. A syrup of the fruit is also good to ease sore throats. There is also a light wine which can be made from loquats.
Other parts of the plant also have uses. The leaves of the tree are used in some Chinese medicine compounds. A decoction of the leaves can be used as a mouthwash in cases of thrush, or for the treatment of coughs or bronchitis. The leaves can be used fresh or dried, so if you have only short term access to a tree, it makes sense to harvest some for drying and keep them on hand for later. The young leaves and the seeds contain cyanogenetic glycocides which turn into cyanide when digested. Even so, there is a sake which is made exclusively from the seeds. It’s also possible to roast the seeds, grind them, and use them as a coffee substitute.
