Medlar is a fruit to be eaten only after ripening. It shouldn't be tasted until it has bletted, or become nearly squishy, and the pulp has achieved the taste and feel of fruit butter. Photo by ...

Chaucer, in the prologue to “The Reeve’s Tale,” wrote that the medlar is not edible “til it be roten,” and Henry Phillips, in his “Pomarium Britannicum” (1821), deemed its ripening a ...