Inside you there are two avocados. One is a glorious emerald nugget. Its skin ripples over its perfect egg shape, with the gnarled knots of an ancient tree. It fades from forest green to midwinter black, its flesh the pale sage of a childhood crayon. And it wears its heart openly: when it is soft on the outside, it is soft on the inside, too.
The other avocado is an angry rock.
Nobody likes Shepard avocados. Not really. For a few weeks every March, fear ripples through social media – perhaps society at large – as we realise, despite everything modern science has done for us, we will be briefly Hass-less. I’ve contributed to this panic, snapping pictures at the first sign of them and tweeting a warning: Sorry, friends, the bad season is here.
But I feel something changing in me.
I don’t know if it’s the pandemic slowly gnawing away at my brain or my tastebuds maturing as I age, but I have become, against all expectation, a reluctant Shepard fan.
One day I found myself at the shops, even more panicked than usual. Overnight, boxes of knobbly alligator pears had been replaced wholesale by their frightening cousins. The shiny skin of the Shepards bounced fluorescent supermarket lighting straight into my eyes.
Eat now, promised a label. I squeezed the fruit with low expectations – it was so hard it could be used to squash a bug, inflict blunt force trauma or build a house.
I had two choices: I could make a chicken and mayo sandwich without avocado – practically treason – or I could buy one that had been formed under intense pressure in the centre of the Earth and hope for the best. I put a Shepard in my basket.
When I got home, I asked a friend who knows stuff about food. Could I, a mere human, eat – and, to that point, digest – one of these botoxed avos?
“You can’t eat it now,” she said, “but leave it out for a few days.”
“Like in an incubator?”
“Nope. On the bench.”
“Oh,” I went. “In a paper bag with a banana. I read about that.”
“No banana. In the open.”
I was sceptical. A Hass avocado left on the bench would quickly become stringy and inedible. Besides, could I risk it falling and causing a concussion?
I set up my Shepard in the corner near the spice rack, packing it in with cayenne pepper, porcini and garlic powder bottles so it couldn’t become a weapon. I told my children not to touch it. I took a photo of it so I could measure progress. Then, for three days, I checked diligently for signs it might become delicious. Day one: hard as a precious jewel. Day two: firm as a chiselled butt. But then, day three: a tiny squish. I squeezed it again to be sure.
I FaceTimed my friend. “Is this right?” I asked, trying to show her the microns of movement in the glossy fruit.
“I literally can’t see anything you’re doing.” But, she assured me, if it had even the smallest give, it was ripe inside. “You’re going to love it. It’s heaven.”
I fetched my sharpest knife. It slipped through the skin like it was nothing, then sliced from stem to base with minuscule resistance. I twisted the two halves; inside, pristine flesh, as though painted on. Not a stringy bit in sight. Not a bruise, a fibre, a blemish.
“It’s perfect,” I told my cat. I removed the seed, careful to avoid avocado hand. Although the chicken and mayo sandwich for which it was intended was long since eaten, my Shepard avocado was, finally, absolutely perfect.
Removing the (perfect) seed left a (perfect) bowl, just right for a little olive oil, a sprinkling of pink salt and a crack of black pepper. I took my makeshift breakfast to the back verandah, scooped the green goodness into my spoon, and wrapped my laughing gear around fully the greatest culinary delight since pouring milk straight into the Milo tin.
Unlike the wicked gristly bits of the Hass, this avo was smooth, rich, and unthreatening. Thick like custard but savoury like mushrooms. Imagine crème caramel but miraculous.
“Incredible,” I told my friend. “Who knew?”
I tweeted about being the first person to ever enjoy a Shepard avocado in the history of time, and many people told me they had, too. Like butter, they said. You just have to let them ripen.
It can feel like a long, dark autumn without Hass but, as I’ve learned, there is a viable alternative.
Shepards just need time on their own to be at their best. And, really, don’t we all.
