Once when I was a kid my parents took me down to visit my great-aunt Madge and her lifetime companion Ruby*, and we spent three hours driving around the countryside of southeastern Illinois while they tried to remember where they had seen a persimmon tree. To six-year-old me, it was a lifetime spent in the car when I could have been playing outside on a beautiful fall day. To them, it was a hunt for something elusive — Native Illinois persimmons.

While persimmon trees are still hard to find in the wild, Fuyu persimmons are easy to find in the store in autumn, and they are bigger and without all the seeds of the wild variety. To make persimmon pudding, you’ll need very ripe, soft ones. If they are underripe, they are crunchy and harder to work with.

This recipe was in my mom’s recipe card collection and presents a few mysteries. First, I think this is Ruby’s recipe. The top of the card actually reads “from the recipe file of Hazel Ruby” (Hazel was Madge’s probable given name, though it could have been the nickname for all my dad and I know). Second, there aren’t any instructions other than bake, and even that lists two separate baking times. So, I’ve filled in some instructions below based on what makes sense from my own experiences. For the sugar, there was a 2 crossed out before 1 1/2 cups, so I’ve left 1 1/2 cups below. It makes a mellow, cake-y pudding, but you can add an extra half cup if you want it sweeter.

2 cups persimmon pulp
1 1-2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
3 eggs
3 cups flour
1 quart milk
1 teaspoon cinnamon (I’d recommend 1 tablespoon)
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg (I’d recommend 2 teaspoons)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 teaspoon soda
pinch of salt

Chop the persimmon into small-ish pieces and pulverize into a pulp. If you are using wild persimmons, remove all the seeds (they will be more seeds than fruit). If you like, slice a few extra slices to decorate on top — but these will need to be in addition to the 2 cups of pulp.

Mix the sugar, butter, and eggs.

In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Alternately add this and the milk to the previous mixture, a little bit at a time, until it’s all combined. Stir in the persimmon pulp.

“Bake in a large tin pan at 350F for 1 hour. (50 minutes large tin pan)” (“lg tin pan” is written in two separate places on the card, so I guess there are two possible sizes of large and the baking time depends on which version of large you use. Or, was Ruby correcting the baking time to account for another type of pan? I don’t remember what I did the last time I baked this, so I’d advise checking it at 50 minutes and give it a little more time if a toothpick doesn’t come out clean.)

Serve warm. A little cream makes it even more delicious!

*As a child, I knew Aunt Madge and Ruby as retired former fifth-grade science teachers who shared a house and spent their lives together. They shared a bedroom with two double beds, and while my grandmother didn’t think there was anything questionable about that, I think the modern consensus is that this was the lesbian representation I witnessed in my oblivious childhood.

Ruby was a formidable woman and sometimes a bit scary. She seemed to have a perpetually dim view of my intelligence and would occasionally glare at me before asking a random pop-quiz question: “What’s the square root of 16?”

She asked me that before my grade school had taught us square roots, but since I was a bored nerdy kid, I’d actually read ahead and was able to give the correct answer.

So, here’s to you, Ruby. I hope I interpreted your persimmon recipe correctly. Maybe you can have a good laugh over this from wherever you are now.