The naturalist put off by durian, then won over
Alfred Russel Wallace was put off by the smell in Malacca and won over in a Borneo forest.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who dedicated his travel book to Charles Darwin, left a famous description of durian. It appears in Chapter V of The Malay Archipelago, his account of years of collecting in the region, and it opens with a confession. When he first tried the fruit in Malacca, the smell defeated him. His mind changed in Borneo, where he found a ripe one lying on the ground, ate it in the open air and became, in his telling, a committed durian eater.
He then tried to explain the taste and more or less admitted he could not. His best comparison was "a rich butter-like custard highly flavoured with almonds", after which he added cream cheese, onion sauce and brown sherry to the list and called the mix incongruous. The fruit, he wrote, was neither acid, nor sweet, nor juicy, and missed none of those things. His verdict was that eating it was worth a voyage to the East.
Wallace was careful about one point. He would not quite call durian the best of all fruits, because juicy, sharper fruits such as oranges and mangoes refresh in a way it cannot. Forced to choose two, he named the durian king and the orange queen.
He also knew he was not the first European to rave about it. He quotes the traveller Linschott, writing in 1599, and Doctor Paludanus, who compared the smell to rotten onions and said people who tasted the fruit came to prefer it over other food. The argument about smell and flavour is at least four centuries old.