Persimmon Pudding

This is my mom’s recipe. It makes a lightly spiced old-timey pudding-cake with a deep persimmon flavor—especially dark if you use wild native persimmon pulp, but also well worth doing with cultivated persimmons. The edges and bottom become a bit chewy and caramelized, while the moist interior falls. Be sure to call the kids into the kitchen to see the surface of the almost-done pudding trembling as the mass underneath bubbles in the heat of the oven. It’s weird.