Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  —from Wild Fruits, 1859

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU ON WATERMELONS

  Watermelons. The first are ripe from August seventh to twenty-eighth (though the last is late), and they continue to ripen till they freeze; are in their prime in September.

  John Josselyn, an old resident in New England, speaks of the watermelon as one of the plants “proper to the country.” He says that it is “of a sad grass-green color, or more rightly sap green; with some yellowness admixed when ripe.”

  September is come with its profusion of large fruits. Melons and apples seem at once to feed my brain.

  How differently we fare now from what we did in winter! We give the butcher no encouragement now, but invite him to take a walk in our garden.

  I have no respect for those who cannot raise melons or who avoid them as unwholesome. They should be spending their third winter with Parry in the arctic regions. They seem to have taken in their provisions at the commencement of the cruise, I know now how many years ago, and they deserve to have a monument erected to them of the empty cans which held their preserved meats.

  Our diet, like that of the birds, must answer to the season. This is the season of west-looking, watery fruits. In the dog-days we come near to sustaining our lives on watermelon juice alone, like those who have fevers. I know of no more agreeable and nutritious food at this season than bread and butter and melons, and you need not be afraid of eating too much of the latter.

  When I am going a-berrying in my boat or other carriage, I frequently carry watermelons for drink. It is the most agreeable and refreshing wine in a convenient cask, and most easily kept cool. Carry these green bottles of wine. When you get to the field you put them in the shade or in water till you want them.

  When at home, if you would cool a watermelon which has been lying in the sun, do not put it in water, which keeps the heat in, but cut it open and place it on a cellar bottom or in a draught of air in the shade.

  There are various ways in which you can tell if a watermelon is ripe. If you have had your eye on the patch much from the first, and so know the history of each one and which was formed first, you may presume that those will ripen soonest. Or else you may incline to those which lie nearest to the center of the hill or root, as the oldest.

  Next, the dull, dead color and want of bloom are as good signs as any. Some look green and livid, and have a very fog of bloom on them, like a mildew. These are as green as a leek through and through, and you’ll find yourself in a pickle if you open one. Others have a dead dark-greenness, the circulations coming less rapid in their cuticles and their blooming period passed, and these you may safely bet on.

  If the vine is quite lively, the death of the quirl at the root of the stem is almost a sure sign. Lest we should not discern it before, this is placed for a sign that there is redness and ripeness within. Of two, otherwise similar, take that which yields the lowest tone when struck with your knuckles, that is, which is hollowest. The old or ripe ones ring bass; the young, tenor or falsetto. Some use the violent method of pressing to hear if they crack within, but this is not to be allowed. Above all no tapping on the vine is to be tolerated, suggestive of a greediness which defeats its own purpose. It is very childish.

  One man told me that he couldn’t raise melons because his children would cut them all up. I think that he convicted himself out of his own mouth. It was evident that he could not raise children in the way they should go and was not fit to be the ruler of a country, according to Confucius’s standard. I once, looking by a special providence through the blinds, saw one of his boys astride of my earliest watermelon, which grew near a broken paling, and brandishing a case-knife over it, but I instantly blowed him off with my voice before serious damage was done—and I made such an ado about it as convinced him that he was not in his father’s dominions, at any rate. This melon, though it lost some of its bloom then, grew to be a remarkably large and sweet one, though it bore, to the last, a triangular scar of the tap which the thief had designed on it.

  The farmer is obliged to hide his melon patch far away in the midst of his corn or potatoes. I sometimes stumble on it in my rambles. I see one today where the watermelons are intermixed with carrots in a carrot bed and so concealed by the general resemblance of the leaves at a little distance.

  It is an old saying that you cannot carry two melons under one arm. Indeed, it is difficult to carry one far, it is so slippery. I remember hearing of a lady who had been to visit her friends in Lincoln, and when she was ready to return on foot, they made her the rather onerous present of a watermelon. With this under her arm she tript it glibly through the Walden Woods, which had a rather bad reputation for goblins and so on in those days. While the wood grew thicker and thicker, and the imaginary dangers greater, the melon did not grow any lighter, though frequently shifted from arm to arm; and at length, it may have been through the agency of one of those mischievous goblins, it slipt from under her arm, and in a moment lay in a dozen pieces in the middle of the Walden road. Quick as thought the trembling traveller gathered up the most luscious and lightest fragments with her handkerchief, and flew rather than ran with them to the peaceful streets of Concord.

  If you have any watermelons left when the frosts come, you may put them into your cellar and keep them till Thanksgiving time. I have seen a large patch in the woods frozen quite hard, and when cracked open they had a very handsome crystalline look.

  Watermelons, said to be unknown to the Greeks and Romans. It is said to be one of those fruits of Egypt which the Jewish people regretted in the desert under the name of abbattichim.

  The English botanists may be said to know nothing about watermelons. The nearest that Gerarde gets to our watermelon is in his chapter on “Citrull Cucumbers,” where he says, “The meat or pulp of Cucumber Citrill which is next unto the bark is eaten.”

  In Spence’s Anecdotes it is said that Galileo used to compare Ariosto’s Orlando to a melon field. “You may meet with a very good thing here and there in it, but the whole is of very little value.” Montaigne says, quoting Aurelius Victor, “The emperor Dioclesian, having resigned his crown and retired to ‘private life,’ was some time after solicited to resume his charge, but he announced, ‘You would not offer to persuade me to this, had you seen the fine condition of the trees I have planted in my orchard, and the fair melons I have sowed in my garden.’ ” Gosse, in his Letters from Alabama, says of the watermelon, “I am not aware that it is known in England; I have never seen it exposed in the London markets,” but it is abundant all over the United States; and in the South:

  The very negroes have their own melon “patches,” as well as their peach orchards, and it is no small object of their ambition to raise earlier or finer specimens than their masters.… [It] may be considered as the best realization of the French princess’s idea of “ice with the chill taken off.” … A cart-load is brought home from the field nearly every evening, to supply the demand of the family for the next day; for during this torrid weather, very little business but the eating of watermelons is transacted. If a guest call, the first offering of friendship is a glass of cold water as soon as seated; then there is an immediate shout for watermelons, and each taking his own, several are destroyed before the knife is laid down. The ladies cut the hard part, near the rind, into stars, and other pretty shapes, which they candy as a conserve for winter.

  —from Wild Fruits, 1859

  FERDINAND HÉDIARD ON MANGOES

  In 1854, Ferdinand Hédiard opened a shop in Paris that provided the French with their first look and taste of exotic fruits. He had them shipped green from Spain, North Africa, Black Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. He particularly delighted in demonstrating at his counter the proper way to peel a banana. Among the fruits he introduced was the mango.

  —M.K.

  A fruit that is highly valued in the tropics, the mango, especially the “greffé” mango, is very fragile and hard to transport. However, we received some in 1889, in Novembe
r and December. The skin is a yellowish green color, sometimes with a red blush; the meat is the color of apricot flesh. In Réunion they make excellent preserves: The mangoes are presented quartered in a sugar syrup. It is a very pretty and delicious dessert.

  —from The Notebook of Ferdinand Hédiard, 1890,

  translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ON PINEAPPLES

  Ferdinand Colon, the son of Christopher Columbus, reproduced passages from his father’s journal of the second voyage in 1493, and since the original journals have now been lost, these transcriptions are all that remain. At the time Columbus arrived on the island of Guadeloupe, the Caribs from South America were in the process of conquering the islands and had introduced South American plants to the Caribbean, including the pineapple.

  —M.K.

  They found in the houses many parrots, green and blue and white and red, big as a common rooster; they also found pumpkins, and a certain kind of fruit that seemed as green pinecones, like ours, only larger, and inside full of a substantial pulp as in a melon, and of much sweeter and delightful aroma and flavor, which grow in plants that are similar to the lily or aloe.

  —from the journal of Christopher Columbus, 1493,

  according to his son, Ferdinand Colon,

  translated from the Spanish by Mark Kurlansky

  LIONEL WAFER ON PINEAPPLES

  Born about 1660, Lionel Wafer wrote of great adventures in Panama and the Caribbean, where he appeared to have known many of the legendary pirates of the day—he may even have been one of them. When Wafer returned to England, possibly after spending time in a colonial prison, he published his book New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, which was much valued for its descriptions.

  —M.K.

  On the Isthmus grows that delicious fruit which we call the Pine-Apple, in shape not much unlike an Artichoke, and as big as a Mans Head. It grows like a Crown on the top of a Stalk about as big as ones Arm, and a Foot and a half high. The Fruit is ordinarily about six Pound weight; and is inclos’d with short prickly Leaves like an Artichoke. They do not strip, but pare off these Leaves to get at the Fruit; which hath no Stone or kernel in it. ’Tis very juicy; and some fancy it to resemble the Tast of all the most delicious Fruits one can imagine mix’d together. It ripens at all times of the Year, and is rais’d from new Plants. The Leaves of the Plant are broad, about a Foot long, and grow from the Root.

  —from New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, 1699

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Dark Side of Chocolate

  FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

  ON THE CURSE

  OF TOBACCO AND CHOCOLATE

  Chocolate is a food, like bananas or anchovies, that lives a different existence in its producing nations than in the lands to which it is exported. Just as banana growers eat their fruit as a green vegetable, and anchovy fishermen eat their little fish fresh, chocolate is known in the Caribbean and Africa, where it is produced, as a juicy fruit.

  It is an odd-looking offspring, a bumpy pod that shoots out of the trunk of a tree on a hoselike stem and looks like it was stuck there by mistake. In these hot countries, children split the pods open and refresh themselves on the milky-white, bland but juicy pulp inside, spitting out the bitter seeds. But it is those seeds, or beans, that the world craves. They are crushed and their natural blend of solid matter and fat are ground into a paste.

  There has always been a suspicion of something dark, powerful, hallucinogenic, and addictive in chocolate. The Aztecs, Mayans, and other Mexican and Central American people introduced the beans to Europeans, claiming they had been made by gods. The bitter substance seemed to be used in ways that produced somewhat altered states, especially in Aztec religious ceremonies during which it was served mixed with hallucinogenic mushrooms.

  Here is the great difference between Columbus and Cortés: Columbus first ran across this xocoatl in 1502 as a drink on an island off present-day Nicaragua. The fact that the gods had made these small hard beans in the “Garden of Life” in no way impressed him, but, in the name of thoroughness, he took a few back in Spain. The Castillian court thought these beans were interesting and unusual, but useless.

  Seventeen years later, Cortés ran across the same hard, bitter beans in the Yucatán. He asked for recipes and returned to Spain with formula for a soup, a drink, and a paste. He also ensured the interest of the Castillian court by pointing out that the locals had sometimes used the beans as money.

  The soup, actually a sauce, has never been popular in Europe. In Mexico it is known as a mole, and as Mexico added to its cultural heritages, the number of ingredients ground into paste to be used as a mole sauce continued to grow. Pre-Spanish moles may have been predominantly chocolate, chiles, tomatoes, and dried, crumbled corn tortillas—all indigenous products. Later, Spanish and Arab foods such as almonds, raisins, garlic, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon were added. A Mexican mole, true to Mexico’s hybrid culture, can have dozens of ingredients. But the European idea of mixing sugar with chocolate was never part of this. Chocolate was a bitter flavoring. Only a few Europeans adopted the sauce—it is used in Tuscany with boar and in the Basque country with hare.

  The drink made an impression on Europe. Some Europeans seemed overwhelmed by the chocolate-drinking craze, and the European reputation of chocolate was in no way helped by such chocolate delinquents as Louis XIV’s wife, Maria Theresa, who could not stop drinking it. She had it every day, which was thought to be the reason all her teeth fell out.

  But when the Castillians tried out the paste recipe, they thought they had found something of commercial value. It was the monks in Guajaca who introduced sugar to the paste, and once they had this paste of chocolate and sugar, the Spanish crown attempted to keep the formula secret. They sold it in blocks mixed with other exotic American ingredients such as vanilla and hot chili peppers. The chocolate was usually redbrick colored from the addition of annatto, the Caribbean seed Columbus had seen rubbed on the bodies of tribesmen, giving them the label “redskins.”

  The Spanish kept their monopoly until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese learned the secret in Brazil. At the time, Portugal had a significant population of Jews who had been expelled from Spain, and once these Jews were driven farther into Europe, starting with the French Basque port of Bayonne, the secret of the paste was out.

  But while its commercial reputation grew, chocolate kept its slightly sinister image. In the seventeenth century a Spanish poet denounced it.

  —M.K.

  There came the devil of tobacco and the devil of chocolate, who avenged the Indies against Spain, for they have done more harm by introducing among us those powders and smoke and chocolate cups and chocolate beaters than the King had ever done through Columbus and Cortés and Almagreo and Pizarro. For it was better and cleaner and more honorable to be killed by a musket ball or a lance then by snuffing and belching and dizziness and fever.

  —from El Entometido y la Dueña y el Soplon, 1628

  EDWARD KIDDER ON CHOCOLATE CREAM

  Edward Kidder, a celebrated seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century London pastry maker, had loyal students who recorded his recipes in leather-bound notebooks. A number of these notebooks are still available. This recipe comes from one such handwritten book.

  —M.K.

  Take a pt. of cream with a spoonfull of scrapt chocolate boyle them well together

  Mix with it the yolks of 2 eggs & thicken & mill it on the fier then pour it into your chocolate cups

  —c. 1730

  BRILLAT-SAVARIN ON CHOCOLATE

  Brillat-Savarin liked ideas. He wrote about few specific foods extensively. One notable exception was chocolate. The Paris chocolate maker he mentions, Debauve, was also singled out for excellence by Grimod de la Reynière. Debauve’s store, as with those of most chocolate makers at the time, was a pharmacy. When Brillat-Savarin was writing The Physiology of Taste, the shop was at 26, rue de Saints-
Pères, a shady street off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Sometime not long after Brillat-Savarin’s book was published, the chocolate-making pharmacy seemed to have taken on a partner, Gallais, and moved two doors down to number 30, where it has been ever since. Today, the semicircular wooden pharmacist counter offers a variety of filled chocolates to please those blessed with both a discerning sweet tooth and a sense of history. The store still makes thin disks of chocolate—the same health remedy sampled by Brillat-Savarin and Grimod.