WORDS
TART AND TENDER Kate Lebo warps the boundaries of food writing in her new Book of Difficult Fruit BY DAN NAILEN
I
t’s a testament to Kate Lebo’s curiosity, knowledge and sheer writing chops that she can spend a chapter describing something as tasting “like peaches laced with onions and garbage” and smelling “a little like turpentine” and you’ll want to merrily try some for yourself — laughing all the way. Of course, you probably won’t get the 38-year-old Lebo to join for another round of the spikey fruit called a durian, grown primarily in Southeast Asia and only found through some digging through Spokane’s Asian grocery stores. The author of The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (With Recipes), arriving in stores April 6, readily admits she threw out
Kate Lebo goes beyond “pie lady” with her new book. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
22 INLANDER APRIL 1, 2021
most of hers, having tried just five bites before she started to feel ill. Some people do have a taste for the durian, though, and you’ll find a recipe for durian ice cream at the end of that chapter, even if Lebo never intends to eat the stuff that caused her husband and fellow author Sam Ligon to proclaim, “That smells like A-S-S.” The difficult fruit in Lebo’s title doesn’t mean just fruit that’s literally hard to keep down (durian is an outlier there), but fruit that’s challenging to work with, hard to find in stores, or rarely referenced in mainstream food writing and recipes. And this book, Lebo’s third, isn’t simply a guide to tackling dishes featuring those fruits (although it is partly that). Difficult Fruit is a
remarkable combination of food writing, memoir, medical and natural history, and cultural anthropology that’s unlike anything you’ve read before. And it’s as welcoming for non-foodies as it is for those familiar with Lebo as the “pie lady” writer of A Commonplace Book of Pie and Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour and Butter, or as co-founder with Ligon of the annual Pie & Whiskey bacchanal during Spokane’s Get Lit! Festival. The inspiration for tackling tricky fruits in her new book, Lebo says, as well as the tricky navigation of family history, romantic relationships, longtime friendships and medical challenges also in its pages, came from back when she was writing and promoting her old books,
