Another glorious summer is well and truly over. And was it ever a good one, with two records being broken for the sunniest, and driest July!

It’s the end of September and it’s already typical fall weather, grey and squally. Comforters and quilts are being aired and readied for the coming cold and we even had the heating on briefly one rainy day this week. It’s time to bring on the soups and stews – you know, hearty stuff to drive away the chill and damp.

And yet, what do I see calling out to me from the supermarket shelves like glowing warm beacons from summers past – passion fruit! At a few dollars apiece, it is an indulgence, but one I can’t resist for a quick-fix way to ward off some the bleakness of the darkening fall days. I can find bottles of passion fruit juice (Sri Lankan), jelly (from Hawaii, where the fruit is known as Lillikoi) and even frozen pulp at a store that caters to Indians from East Africa. But it’s the sight of the fresh fruit that really makes me long for a warm day with cloudless skies.

There are two kinds  here. The granadilla is tennis ball sized with glowing tangerine skin and delicate translucent silver grey pulp. It is sweet, not very acid and easy to eat out of hand, seeds and all. The other, rusty purple skinned, with tart, wonderfully fragrant orange pulp, is the sort I’m most familiar with. It’s the kind that grows wild all over Coorg. Yet another of those fruits native to South America like Cape gooseberries that have made themselves very much at home there. The glossy leaved vines of Passiflora edulis, with their corkscrew tendrils and beautiful, complicated flowers, drape themselves over fence posts, climb up trees, water tanks and even surprise you on wooded trails nowhere near a home!

Passion fruit juice is as much a staple offering as nellikai or kaipuli juice in Coorg homes. (You can buy bottles of homemade passion fruit squash in many stores there.)

For many years, the routine at home would go something like this: my father collects the mature fruit, patiently filling fruit bowls with the odd twos and threes that choose to ripen together. The numbers slowly build, the older fruit getting steadily more dimpled and shrunken. This is not a problem because the fruit is actually getting sweeter and more intensely flavoured. One fine day, there is suddenly a great heap of wrinkly purple eggs, waiting to be dealt with. This is where my mother steps in with operation slice, scoop, sieve. All those little passion fruit are sliced, pulp scooped out and, because most of us don’t fancy the seeds, sieved through a strainer. She then freezes this concentrated pulp in popsicle moulds, ice trays and even in Ziploc bags, for easy thawing anytime the fancy takes us for a glass of fresh passion fruit juice. There’s nothing quite like it!

My own experiments with passion fruit ran to making jelly, sorbets and soufflé. I used it for topping cheesecake, glazing tea bread, and so on. But, rather like the butter fruit (avocados) we grew up on the association was always with a sweet preparation. It took the relative scarcity and a price tag attached for me to begin to consider more carefully what I could do with one or two fruit.

So this time, it’s a simple savoury dressing that I muddled together as a sauce to go with pan fried fish.

Savoury passion fruit dressing

Remove the pulp from two ripe purple passion fruit and push it through a strainer to remove the seeds. You should have about two tablespoons of thick extract.

For the passion fruit dressing:

• 2 tbsp thick passion fruit extract
• 1 tsp sugar or honey
• 3 tbsp neutral tasting oil
• A few sprigs of fresh coriander, leaves only (save the stems)
• 1/4 tsp freshly grated young ginger
• 1/4 tsp finely sliced hot green chilli
• Salt to taste

Chop the coriander leaves finely and whisk all the ingredients together to make an emulsion. Set aside.Whisk again just before serving.

For the fish: (to serve two)

• 1/2 cup finely chopped shallots.
• 1/2 cup oil
• 2 tbsp butter
• salt and pepper
• Finely chopped coriander stems

Pat the cleaned fish dry and then rub a mixture of salt, pepper and chopped coriander stems over and inside the fish.

Heat the oil and butter in a pan (you can bake or broil the fish too, but trout loves this butter bath!) and add the shallots.

Stir for a minute, then add the fish. Cook both sides on medium heat. Remove to a platter and serve it up with a side of roast potatoes and a dollop of the passion fruit dressing.

I think this would make a great marinade for pork ribs or chops and oily fish like salmon. It also makes a terrific salad dressing – perfumed, sharp and with just a little bite. Go ahead and experiment with a little passion (fruit)!