by Rebecca Rupp
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In Which
MELONS
UNDERMINE
MARK TWAIN’S
MORALS
plus
Marco Polo’s Fruit Leathers,
Dr. Livingstone’s African Discovery,
Mrs. Trollope’s Annoyance, and
Queen Anne’s Pomander Ball
It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented.
MARK TWAIN
You’re thinking perhaps that melons aren’t vegetables, and what on earth are they doing here. And you’re right, of course: they’re not vegetables, but fruits, both botanically speaking and in the foodie sense of the word. They’re the only things in the vegetable garden that we ordinarily eat straight off the vine for dessert. On the other hand, the Chinese, who raise cooking melons, treat them like vegetables.
It’s a tricky distinction. Oklahoma, whose official state fruit (since 2005) is the strawberry, declared the watermelon its official state vegetable in 2007. The Oklahoma watermelon bill was sponsored by Senator Don Barrington (R-Rush Springs) — one-time winner of a hometown watermelon-seed-spitting contest — who held that the watermelon is a vegetable by virtue of its relationship to the obviously vegetable (non-dessert) cucumber and gourd. Nineteen state senators and the National Watermelon Promotion Board disagreed. Among the dissenters was Nancy Riley (D-Tulsa), who stubbornly insisted that her dictionary called watermelon a fruit, which most of them do.
A fruit, to a botanist, develops from the fertilized ovary of a flower, which means that tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, bean and pea pods, peppers, eggplants, and corn kernels are all fruits. A botanical vegetable, on the other hand, is any edible part of a plant that doesn’t happen to be a fruit, such as roots (beets, carrots, and turnips), leaves (spinach, cabbage, and lettuce), flower clusters (cauliflower and broccoli), stems (asparagus), tubers (potatoes), and bulbs (onions). In the popular sense, however, fruit is a treat, which is why teachers get apples instead of eggplants, and why Hades chose a pomegranate to tempt Persephone.
The very word fruit comes from the Latin fructus or frui, meaning to enjoy. Fruits generally have the edge over vegetables because they appeal to the sweet tooth — a sense actually located at the tip of the tongue and active from infancy. Babies, no fools, repeatedly opt for applesauce over strained peas, and the sweetness preference persists undeterred into adulthood. Most temperate-zone fruits contain about 10 to 15 percent sugar by weight; tropical-zone fruits are even sweeter at 20 to 26 percent. In the annual vegetable garden, the melons are a bit on the low side: muskmelons, when ripe, contain 6 to 8 percent sugar, about half as much as the average apple or pear. Watermelons — described by Mark Twain as “chief of the world’s luxuries . . . when one has tasted it, he knows what angels eat” — contain 12 percent sugar, max.
Melons, classification-wise, are a mess. Historically, they were thought to be funny-looking cucumbers. Pliny the Elder describes a “new form of cucumber” peculiarly “shaped like a quince.” “Cucumbers of this kind,” he continues, “do not hang from the plant but grow of a round shape laying on the ground; they have a golden color.” His quincelike cucumber also spontaneously separated from its stalk when ripe, which sounds suspiciously like a melon.
Thomas Hill’s Gardener’s Labyrinth (1577), intended as a comprehensive guidebook for gardeners, including “instructions for the choice of seedes, apt times for sowing, setting, planting, and watering, and the vessels and instrumentes serving to that use and purpose,” explained that the ancients considered pumpkins and melons to be “a kinde of Cucumbers,” which made sense, according to Hill, because cucumbers in the garden sometimes spontaneously turn into melons or pumpkins. This spurious scrap of information survived well into the eighteenth century in gardening manuals that warned against planting melons and cucumbers in close proximity for fear that crossbreeding would produce cucumber-flavored melons.
Melons and cucumbers are both members of Cucurbitaceae, variously known, depending on one’s major interest, as the Melon, Cucumber, Gourd, Squash, or Pumpkin family. Both belong to the genus Cucumis, but are separate species — respectively C. melo (melons) and C. sativus (cucumbers) — and so do not interbreed. An exception is the sinuous Armenian cucumber (C. melo var. flexuosus) — also called the yard-long or snake cucumber — which will cross with the melon because, despite its cucumberish name and appearance, it actually is a melon.
Taxonomists organize melons into three major groups, which unfortunately correspond only vaguely to common garden melonspeak. The melon known to most of us as the cantaloupe is botanically a muskmelon, C. melo var. reticulatus, the word reticulatus referring to the netted shell or rind. The fashion-conscious French call these embroidered melons. They are heavily fragrant, green- or orange-fleshed, and usually weigh two to four pounds apiece.
The true cantaloupe, C. melo var. cantalupensis, is primarily grown in Europe. Most of these are segmented, with hard (but not netted) shells and orange or green flesh. The name comes from Cantalupo (“wolf howl”) in Italy, site of a palatial papal vacation home outside Rome, where the melons were reputedly first cultivated in Europe in the sixteenth century. Casaba and honeydew melons are winter melons, scientifically known as C. melo var. inodorus because they lack the intense fragrance of other melons. All three of the melon groups — muskmelons, cantaloupes, and winter melons — are closely related and given a sporting chance will promiscuously interbreed.
Recent phylogenetic analyses, undertaken to investigate the complex genetic and geographical scrambling among Cucumis species, indicate that the common ancestor of both cucumber and melon originated in Asia. Today, though, the closest living wild relative of the melon is indigenous to Australia.
The ancient Greeks ate melons. One story recounted by food historian Waverley Root tells of a melon half pitched by a heckler at the orator Demosthenes in the course of a political debate. Demosthenes, never at a loss, is said to have promptly clapped the melon on his head and thanked the thrower for finding him a helmet to wear while fighting Philip of Macedon. Melons, temptingly cut in half as if for eating raw, appear in a painting on a wall in Herculaneum, the next-door neighbor of Pompeii.
The Roman cookbook Apicius includes a recipe for “Melon-Gourds and Melons,” at least the first of which — most likely the Chinese bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria — must have been boiled before coming to the table. The author recommends a dressing of pepper, pennyroyal, honey, broth, and vinegar, with perhaps the addition of silphium, or giant fennel.
The melon faded from Europe with the decline of the Roman Empire. It reappeared sporadically, following contacts with the Near East — Charlemagne is said to have acquired some in the course of his altercations with the Spanish Moors, and the Crusaders may have brought a few home from their debilitating struggles with the Saracens. Marco Polo noted melons in the course of his epic thirteenth-century journey to Cathay, growing near the city of Sapurgan (possibly Shibarghan in Afghanistan). The Sapurganians grew “the very best melons in the world. They preserve them by paring them round and round into strips, and drying them in the sun,” at which point — presumably turned into fruit leathers — they tasted “sweeter than honey.”
The melon was finally cultivated again in quantity in fifteenth-century France, where it enjoyed a popularity craze of the sort that these days surrounds rock musicians. By 1583, the dean of the College of Doctors of Lyons, Professor Jacques Pons, had solemnly produced a Succinct Treatise on Melons, which listed fifty different methods of melon preparation, and in 1699 John Evelyn, in superlatives he usually reserved for salad greens, deemed melons “the noblest production of the garden.” Even Montaigne, who generally preferred salted beef to sweets, fell for the melon, announcing in the course of his celebrated Essays (1580), “I am not excessively fond of salads nor of fruits, except melons.” Out-of-season melons were eagerly cultivated in hotbeds and greenhouses, and Louis XIV, never one to stint
himself, had seven varieties cultivated at Versailles, all under glass.
Despite a number of spurious sightings, there were no melons in North America until the European colonists brought them here. Early records of Indian “pompions” almost certainly refer to less luscious pumpkins or squash. One of the earliest accounts of the colonial melon comes from Adrien Van der Donck, a Dutch administrator who arrived in the New Netherlands in 1642 with the doubtful assignment of keeping an eye out for the interests of the financial bigwigs back home. Van der Donck, who had the distinction of being both the only lawyer and the only university graduate in the Dutch colonies, was an avid observer and note-taker, and in 1653 published the result of both activities in his comprehensive Description of the New Netherlands. In it, he describes the colonial muskmelons, which were nicknamed “Spanish pork” and grew “luxuriantly.”
Thomas Jefferson grew melons at Monticello, including eighteen hills of “Zatte di Massa,” a cantaloupe, and eleven hills of muskmelons. He also grew “citron” melons, primarily used for pickling, and, in 1824, experimented with the “Serpentine cucumber.”
The earliest muskmelons and associates were, to the critical modern eye, hopelessly tiny. The Romans, who imported melons from Armenia, were dealing in fruits the size of oranges, and even the green-fleshed Nutmeg melon, so popular in America in the early nineteenth century, started out not much bigger than a softball. None of the early melons was as sweet as their latter-day descendants either, though the beleaguered South during the Civil War boiled melons down as a source of sugar and molasses.
By the mid-nineteenth century, green-fleshed melons were being replaced in the popular favor by orange-fleshed melons, which were both gaudier and higher in vitamin A. By the late 1800s, there was also increasing interest in so-called “novelty” melons.
One such, the Banana melon or Banana cantaloupe, was introduced in 1883, a smoothly elongated pale yellow fruit with salmon-pink flesh. “When ripe,” commented Massachusetts seedsman J. J. H. Gregory, “it reminds one of a large overgrown banana and, what is a singular coincidence, it smells like one.” It doesn’t seem to have tasted particularly good, and W. Atlee Burpee, who states significantly that they grow it in New Jersey, damns it as “poor quality.” Burpee, generally critical of foreign novelty melons, nonetheless offers a selection of them in very small and undescriptive print, repressively reminding the buyer that “our American sorts are best adapted for market purposes.”
The casaba melon (named for Kasaba, Turkey) arrived in this country in the 1850s under the auspices of the U.S. Patent Office, which distributed packets of free seeds to potential growers. However, no one seems to have liked it much — the casaba was green, amid the prevailing preference for orange — and it only became popular in the 1920s. The honeydew melon, also green, appeared in the early 1900s, discovered, the story goes, by a gentleman named Gauger who squirreled away the seeds of the melon served him for breakfast at his New York City hotel. The melon was subsequently identified as a French winter melon called White Antibes.
Dr. Livingstone, before his whereabouts were discovered by the persistent Henry Stanley, observed vast tracts of watermelons in the Kalahari Desert.
The watermelon, though a distant cousin of C. melo, is an entirely different kettle of fish, prevented by genetic distance from cross-pollinating with other garden melons. Watermelons are natives of tropical Africa. Dr. Livingstone, before his whereabouts were discovered by the persistent Henry Stanley, observed vast tracts of them growing wild in the Kalahari Desert in 1854. Their seeds, he noted, were dispersed by antelopes.
Watermelons were cultivated in the Nile River Valley by 2000 BCE — an unmistakable immense striped watermelon appears in an Old Kingdom (2600–2100 BCE) tomb painting, posed on a platter. They seem to have been introduced to Europe in the eighth century CE with the Moorish invasion of Portugal and Spain, though the climate at points further north was too cool to suit them — or indeed any melon. A bill of 1612 mentions “earthen pans for the coveringe of the Mellons,” and John Parkinson notes in Paradisi in Sol (1629) that when it came to melons, “this country hath not had until of late yeares the skill to nourse them up kindly,” and mentions that melons were “only eaten by great personages,” presumably those who had greenhouses.
The watermelon was wildly successful in the New World. It was introduced by the Spaniards, and promptly outran them, the seeds rapidly passing “from tribe to tribe like smoke signals.” Expeditions of exploration found watermelons in Georgia, Florida, the Rio Grande Valley, and throughout the American Southwest, and Père Marquette noted watermelons growing along the Mississippi River in 1673. He found them “excellent, especially those with red seeds.”
Dutch settlers also had watermelons, called citrulls or water-citrons, which the observant Adriaen Van der Donck referred to in 1655 as “a fruit only known before to us from its being brought occasionally from Portugal.” The colonial versions were sometimes crushed for juice, a popular beverage — and the singleminded English fermented it, to make watermelon wine. John Josselyn, in New England’s Rarities (1674), mentioned its use as an antidote for fever: “Watermelon is often given to those sick of Feavers and other hot diseases with good success.” (Failing that, home medics advised cranberry conserve or sassafras chips boiled in beer.) Josselyn thought the watermelon “proper to the countrie,” which it wasn’t.
The colonial watermelon was at the small to middling end of the scale by present standards, though the travel diary of Hugh Grove, who toured Virginia in 1732, mentions watermelons “green and bigg as a Pumpin.” Modern cultivars range in weight from a tiny five to a Sunday-school-picnic-sized hundred pounds, though the general trend today is toward the smallish. Particularly popular are the cannonball-shaped “icebox melons,” so nicknamed because — at an average of 10 to 15 pounds apiece — they fit nicely in the family refrigerator.
Despite the lurid pink associated with the word watermelon, watermelon flesh can be red, orange, yellow, or white, and the fruit itself can be round, ovoid, oblong, or practically cylindrical, with rinds of pale green to almost black. Late nineteenth-century catalogs routinely offered twenty to thirty watermelon cultivars, among them the mouthwatering Golden Honey (yellow-fleshed), the Jersey Blue (dark blue rind), and the Moon and Stars (deep green rind sprinkled with bright yellow spots). Low-sugar varieties — citrons — were grown specifically for pickling, and judging by Amelia Simmons, watermelon “rine” pickles were common by at least 1796.
Watermelon, a historical thirst-quencher, is 92 percent water, but the remaining 8 percent is surprisingly high in nutrients. Red-fleshed watermelon contains lycopene — the same lush pigment that puts the red in tomatoes and red grapefruit — but has 40 percent more of it, ounce for ounce, than the tomato, previously believed to be the dietary leader in lycopene. A highly effective antioxidant, lycopene consumption has been shown to reduce the incidences of certain forms of cancer and to cut the risk of heart disease.
Even better, depending on one’s medical priorities, may be watermelon’s content of citrulline, which — converted to the amino acid arginine via biochemical pathways in the body — lowers blood pressure and bolsters the circulatory and immune systems. Furthermore, via elevation of nitric oxide, it exerts a Viagra-like effect on the body’s blood vessels, though researchers hasten to caution that, unlike Viagra, it is not “organ-specific.”
The major watermelon event of the twentieth century was the development of the seedless melon, a Japanese innovation that bids fair to eliminate the old-fashioned summer seed-spitting orgies on the back porch. The seedless watermelon, first introduced to this country in 1948, is triploid, which means that instead of the ordinary two sets of chromosomes per cell, these variants have three — which explains all the tris and triples that pop up in seedless watermelon varietal names. The flesh, extra-solid and sweet, is generally thought superior to that of the seeded melons, but seedless melons are generally pricier than their diploid relatives, due to
poor germination rates and low yields. Seedless watermelons, being seedless, can’t make more melons, and are the vegetable equivalent of mules.
Some people, of course, like the seeds. Watermelon seeds are a traditional snack food in Asia and the Middle East, where they are roasted, spiced, and sometimes sold in bags like popcorn. But most of us apparently don’t. According to the National Watermelon Promotion Board, only 16 percent of the watermelons sold in American grocery stores now have seeds — down from 42 percent in 2003.
Emphatically not among watermelon seed lovers was the impossible-to-please Frances Trollope, author of the American-damning Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Mrs. Trollope encountered watermelons in Cincinnati, where wagon loads were brought to the market every day, after which “I was sure to see groups of men, women, and children seated on the pavement round the spot where they were sold, sucking in prodigious quantities of this water fruit. Their manner of devouring them is extremely unpleasant; the huge fruit is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth . . . while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.” She tried some melon and found it “vile stuff,” though eventually learned to like it, at least when taken with claret and sugar.
The major watermelon event of the twentieth century was the development of the seedless melon, which may eliminate the old-fashioned summer seed-spitting orgies on the back porch.
Professional melon breeding took off at the end of the nineteenth century, with some fifty new melon varieties appearing on the market between 1880 and 1900. Recent research has concentrated on the development of disease-resistant varieties, though modern science has done little about one of the foremost melon pests, the human being.
