On cut fruit

The perfect ending.

I am not a dessert person. It’s probably a hangover from my Cantonese upbringing, but every meal, including ones at restaurants, always ended on fruit. Every time I went to visit my aunty, my dad always made sure to have a tray of seasonal fruit to present to her as soon as we walked through the door. She’d receive it with glee and chill a bunch of them in preparation for dessert.

My uncle and aunt both worked in restaurants and inherited an old lazy Susan banquet table at some stage of my childhood. My uncle would always prepare food for days- marinating, hanging and deep frying- to put together a ridiculous spread even though it would be a casual Tuesday night dinner where my elder cousins would be late to the table because they’d be hanging with friends at uni.

My favourite cousin is five years older than me, and when you’re eleven years old, that makes a huge difference. I was just finishing up primary school when he was agonising over VCE, taking driving lessons and enjoying the thrill of underage drinking. He is the best. He never talked to me like a kid and we’d always sit around the dinner table battling it out for our favourite dishes with chopsticks and elbows, taking control of the table with a deceptively placed spin. His dad also told us to sit next to each other all the time because we had the same palate, which is our grandfather’s palate.

My uncle would cook homely, old-people tasting food for us, and sweet and sour pork for my sister. She made the mistake of saying she liked it once, so he’d fry up a massive plate for her every fortnight and expect her to do the heavy lifting. Even twenty years later, the mention of her name has him battering pork and rigging up the gas bottle in the backyard.

While she choked down sweet and sour, my cousin and I would stuff ourselves with cabbage, braised tofu, taro and fish. When dinner was over, we’d sit around talking about TV shows, or what courses we were going to do in our next phases of education. I remember my cousin warning me about the entrance exam for MacRob (he went to Melbourne High) and how much emphasis they placed on maths and sciences. We’d always be mid-conversation and my aunt would clear the table and put down a huge platter of cut, seasonal fruit that had been chilled to the perfect eating temperature and insist we eat it all. Mangoes would be sliced off their cheeks, cross-hatched and turned out. Lychees would sit in bunches next to washed grapes, glistening cherries and sliced watermelon. In the winter, oranges would be cut from their wedges and mostly teased from the rind so you could plop the segment into your mouth. Rockmelon would come as door stops with bite-sized chunks carved out for ease of eating. Pomelos would be peeled from their helmet-like skin, popped from their thick membranes, revealing perfectly undressed segments. There would always be bowls on the side for pits, skins and shells. There is nothing better.