You can find Durian pretty readily these days, though they'll have been frozen, in Asian markets. This is the fruit variously described as a pleasure-pain, a very acquired taste, or an appalling eating experience. South East Asians go delirious about them and pay huge sums of money to eat them fresh in season. For the rest of us the experience is either an immediate delight or one to be seriously avoided. Most often it's equated with consuming a rotting peach in a blocked up bathroom.

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. The flesh beneath a spiked shell that you'd imagine would have deterred its very first adventurous diner is pulpy. If you 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 hve been saved from.

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