PLUMS ARE TO thank for one of the shortest and sweetest works of English literature, William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say": "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox / and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast / Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold."

Plums have it good in English, figuratively speaking. Good things are plum. Come to think of it, stone fruit as a class get the long end of the stick. Think "peachy," or superlatives applied to apricot-like skin. Well deserved, I guess, but leaving little room for other fruits to have their moment in the linguistic sun. I'm proposing a vigorous campaign to replace the approbatory use of cool with kumquat. Symmetrically, for opprobrium, there's loquat.

No lapidary poem exists (in English) for the kumquat. Tony Harrison, though, offers "A Kumquat for John Keats," wherein, borrowing from Keats, he describes kumquat consumption, saying of the experience, "Melancholy dwelled inside Delight." Apt for this pop-into-mouth pygmy citrus, with its thin, sweet skin and tart flesh.

Although the kumquat's in the citrus family, its genus is Fortunella, for Robert Fortune, who brought the fruit to England in 1846. Fortune figures in other ways for the kumquat. Its fruit, lucky for the lunar new year, is supposed to bring good fortune. In Vietnam, people carefully select live kumquat trees for Tet. The ideal specimen has ripe fruit, green fruit, verdant leaves, flowers, and buds – symbols of present wealth, wealth to come, and generations past and future. And the kumquat makes me feel fortunate – there aren't many fruits we get to eat whole, skin, seeds, and all. Catch these little ovals while you can – which seems to be now, judging from their recent appearance in a friend's Eatwell Farms produce box, complete with a recipe for a kumquat martini. In November, out east, I was fed a memorable red beet salad with slender rounds of kumquat in it. I've been on the lookout to repeat the experience ever since, but, though printed and Internet matter suggests kumquats can be found December through March, my searches have been in vain. It's only lately that I got to satisfy my jonesing, and circumstances didn't allow slicing for a salad.

Brought to the United States in 1850, the kumquat grew popular as edible decoration in fancier homes, where branches or bushes would be placed at table for guests to pick the fruit. (Picture a flirty lady crying, "How Edenic!") Now it's cultivated in our own home state and in Florida (where Dade City's annual kumquat festival includes a pageant, complete with kumquat queen and court).

As a kid, I used to await the school bus under a tall tree with fleshy apricot-orange fruits. I knew they were 'quats of a sort, but kum- or lo-? I'd stand there wondering, get reminded, only to promptly forget again. The fruit was not that memorable, perhaps that's why – soft, a little mealy, and equally drab in flavor. No doubt you've guessed by now that the tree was of the lo-, not kum-, variety. The loquat is a pome (think pears and apples), in fact related to the rose. Indigenous to China, it likes a Mediterranean climate and was popular as a soft fruit that matures early in the year, before the apricot and peach. Since now we can have apricots regardless of the season (though whether these rubbery fruits deserve the moniker of apricot is in question), the loquat has lost its claim to fame.

The tiny, evergreen kumquat shrub is also indigenous to (southern) China. Apparently, the first written mention of this ancient fruit is not from China, though, but in an Iraqi writer's Book of Nagatean Agriculture, circa 904, in reference to a grafting method. Alan Davidson quotes this passage (in The Penguin Companion to Food): "It must be done ... at the time of a certain conjunction of sun and moon, [and the tree must be] fumigated with certain substances whilst a formula is uttered. The branch which is to be grafted must be in the hand of a beautiful damsel, whilst a male person has disgraceful and unnatural sexual intercourse with her; during intercourse the woman grafts the branch into the tree." Not surprisingly, I guess, Iraq isn't famed for kumquat prolificacy. In case you've conjectured some connection between the previous passage and the fruit's name, I hasten to say that Davidson informs us kumquat is a corruption of chin lan, Chinese for golden mandarin.

Should you have the self-control not to consume all of your kumquat stash at once, the best way to store the fruit is in a sealed plastic bag in the refrigerator. I came across some set aside neatly in just this way one recent midnight-snack time in someone else's house. They weren't long for this world, once I laid eyes on them. I did leave a note, though: "I have eaten / the kumquats / that were in / the icebox ... / Forgive me / they were delicious."

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.