You can find Durian pretty readily these days in Asian markets, though they'll have been frozen. Native to Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, Thailand has become the major exporter of the two- to seven-pound cultivated fruits. South East Asians go delirious about them, battling for the best once it appears in early summer. For the rest of us the experience is either an acquired taste or one seriously to be avoided.

The words 'scent' and 'putrid' are rarely used in the same sentence. But Westerners often apply them together to describe the taste of a durian. Most often its flavor and texture is equated with consuming a rotting peach in a blocked up bathroom.

The flesh beneath a spiked shell you'd imagine would have deterred its very first adventurous diner, is pulpy. Its so-called 'scent' is a stench. If you're curious now but haven't the courage to try the fruit, a Durian popsicle in Asian markets' freezer cabinets will give you a dim sense of what you're missing. Or have been saved from.

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