North Carolina gardener Jess Smith cherishes a special fall tradition from her childhood in Davidson County. “Every year my grandmother, my sister, my cousin, and I would walk down to the edge of the woods to the persimmon tree and pick the persimmons up off the ground,” says the expert canner and social media influencer, who is known as the Naked Gardener to her thousands of followers because she shows the entire process of making preserves, from seed to spread. After gathering the fruits, they would head home and present them to Smith’s grandfather, whom she called Pawpaw; he would sit at the kitchen table, cut the seeds open, and make a pronouncement about the winter weather. “It was such a magical thing as a child because we really believed that whatever was in those persimmons was the weather we would get,” she recalls.
The old folk wisdom that the shape of a persimmon embryo corresponds to the coming weather has swirled around the Ozarks and Appalachia for generations, with no clear origin story. A spoon shape supposedly denotes snowfall, a knife means bitter cold, and a fork predicts a temperate winter. Or as Smith sums it up, “For the spoons, that means you’ll be shoveling snow. A knife means you’ll have cutting winds, and a fork means you’ll have a mild winter in which you could plant and harvest. We always prayed for spoons as kids.” If there’s a mix of shapes in the seeds, the proportions indicate the amount of snowy versus cold versus mild days in store.
Smith has kept the tradition alive as an adult, this year collecting persimmons from a friend’s family homestead. As she does every year, she took them home, rinsed them, put them through her food mill, gathered the seeds from the top, and split them. “Every one of them had a spoon,” she reports, “so get your shovels ready.” Though the reading is definitely more folklore and less science, the same shape presented itself last year, she notes, and it was spot on—the Carolinas received unprecedented amounts of snowfall.
If you plan to investigate the accuracy for yourself, Smith cautions that splitting the seeds can be a tricky business (“you will cut yourself and you will get frustrated”). She suggests taking a serrated knife, holding the seed with your fingers, and working the knife into the ridge that runs all the way around the seed. “Once you get that knife into the edge, you can push it down on a table or a counter, and that will split it straight down the middle.”
Then comes the sweetest part of the ritual: making persimmon pudding. Smith uses her grandmother Marie’s recipe, which she shares with G&G below. “It is not fluffy like a cake and it is not sticky like pudding,” she says. “It’s syrupy and sweet and very dense.” She serves it warm with a glass of milk.
For Smith, foraging for persimmons is all about honoring her roots and keeping the folklore alive. “Both of my grandparents are gone, and it’s a way to remember them,” she says. “The magic from my childhood is absolutely still there every time I cut a persimmon seed open.”
Persimmon Pudding
Yield: 12-15 servings
Ingredients
2 cups persimmon pulp
3 eggs
1½ cups whole milk
1¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. nutmeg (optional)
1 cup sugar
½ cup packed brown sugar
1 stick of melted butter
2 tsp. vanilla
Preparation
Combine all ingredients, mix until smooth, and bake at 300°F for 70 minutes or until dark brown.
Store in the refrigerator once it’s cooled to room temperature.
Serve warm.
Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
