The earliest European mention of this fruit is that by Nicolo Conti. The passage is thus rendered by Winter Jones: "In this island (Sumatra) there also grows a green fruit which they call duriano, of the size of a cucumber. When opened five fruits are found within, resembling oblong oranges. The taste varies like that of cheese." (In India in the XVth Cent., p. 9.) We give the original Latin of Poggio below, which must be more correctly rendered thus: "They have a green fruit which they call durian, as big as a water-melon. Inside there are five things like elongated oranges, and resembling thick butter, with a combination of flavours." (See Carletti, below).
The dorian in Sumatra often forms a staple article of food, as the [jack] (q.v.) does in Malabar. By natives and old European residents in the Malay regions in which it is produced the dorian is regarded as incomparable, but novices have a difficulty in getting over the peculiar, strong, and offensive odour of the fruit, on account of which it is usual to open it away from the house, and which procured for it the inelegant Dutch nickname of stancker. "When that aversion, however, is conquered, many fall into the taste of the natives, and become passionately fond of it." (Crawfurd, H. of Ind. Arch. i. 419.) [Wallace (Malay Arch. 57) says that he could not bear the smell when he "first tried it in Malacca, but in Borneo I found a ripe fruit on the ground, and, eating it out of doors, I at once became a confirmed Durian eater ... the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact to eat Durians is a new sensation, worth a voyage to the East to experience.">[ Our forefathers had not such delicate noses, as may be gathered from some of the older notices. A Governor of the Straits, some forty-five years ago, used to compare the Dorian to 'carrion in custard.'
c. 1440.—"Fructum viridem habent nomine durianum, magnitudine cucumeris, in quo sunt quinque veluti malarancia oblonga, varii saporis, instar butyri coagulati."—Poggii, de Varietate Fortunae, Lib. iv.
1552.—"Durions, which are fashioned like artichokes" (!)—Castanheda, ii. 355.
1553.—"Among these fruits was one kind now known by the name of durions, a thing greatly esteemed, and so luscious that the Malacca merchants tell how a certain trader came to that port with a ship load of great value, and he consumed the whole of it in guzzling durions and in gallantries among the Malay girls."—Barros, II. vi. i.
1563.—"A gentleman in this country (Portuguese India) tells me that he remembers to have read in a Tuscan version of Pliny, 'nobiles durianes.' I have since asked him to find the passage in order that I might trace it in the Latin, but up to this time he says he has not found it."—Garcia, f. 85.
1588.—"There is one that is called in the Malacca tongue durion, and is so good that I have heard it affirmed by manie that have gone about the worlde, that it doth exceede in savour all others that ever they had seene or tasted.... Some do say that have seene it that it seemeth to be that wherewith Adam did transgresse, being carried away by the singular savour."—Parke's Mendoza, ii. 318.
1598.—"Duryoen is a fruit ỹt only groweth in Malacca, and is so much comẽded by those which have proued ye same, that there is no fruite in the world to bee compared with it."—Linschoten, 102; [Hak. Soc. i. 51].
1599.—The Dorian, Carletti thought, had a smell of onions, and he did not at first much like it, but when at last he got used to this he liked the fruit greatly, and thought nothing of a simple and natural kind could be tasted which possessed a more complex and elaborate variety of odours and flavours than this did.—See Viaggi, Florence, 1701; Pt. II. p. 211.
1601.—"Duryoen ... ad apertionem primam ... putridum coepe redolet, sed dotem tamen divinam illam omnem gustui profundit."—Debry, iv. 33.