Sunday, June 28, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Encounters Two Muskmelons, Part 1 of 3

The melons are endless. New types pour into the grocery stores and overwhelm the Fruit Explorer. I won't attempt to cover them all, but I will taste a few more. This e-mail covers the Korean melon and the Hami melon, which I bought at H Mart on 23 Jun 2015.

These two melons are among the many cultivars of the muskmelon (Cucumis melo). Muskmelon cultivars include those whose surfaces are smooth (honeydew and casaba (7 Sep 2014)) and reticulated (cantaloupe and Christmas melon (25 Aug 2014)). ("Reticulated" means net-like and is from the Latin "rete," which means net. You have seen this root in other contexts, e.g., reticule, which is a woman's small net bag,reticulated python, and retiarius. which is a Roman gladiator armed like a fisherman with a net and trident. Go to this site to buy a retiarius action figure.) The muskmelon is compared to wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea, see the table in the e-mail of 12 Jun 2015) in that both species have given rise to a large number of cultivars. This plasticity is one of the reasons why there are so many melons. The muskmelon is native to Iran, Turkey, and Armenia, but, despite the many cultivars, the muskmelon has not been found in the wild.


To learn more about melon classification and melon terminology, try this site, which also has a good survey of the various melons. 

Korean Melon

The Korean melon (no PLU sticker) is notable because it is small and has a bright yellow pattern that makes it stand out even in a grocery aisle teeming with eye-catching fruit. Mine weighed 1.08 pounds, so at $1.99 per pound, which is high for a melon, it set me back $2.08.  As the pictures show, the Korean melon is smooth-skinned. Here are pictures from the Internet.
  • This melon is football-shaped and yellow with longitudinal white stripes.
  • A pile of Korean melons that shows a cross-section of the seeds in the middle.
  • A bin full of Korean melons.


   
   



Here are pictures of my Korean melon.
  • The whole melon in its resplendent glory. This is a melon for an artist to include in a still life.
  • The melon cut into halves. I elected to cut it lengthwise. You can see that the seeds are gathered in the middle and comprise a good fraction of the volume of this melon.
  • The melon cut into quarters and showing the seeds.  It is said that this melon can be eaten whole--seeds, rind, and all--but I didn't try it.
  • The quarters with the seeds pared out. I had to use a knife to do this, and it took some care.
  • The profile of a quarter to show how thin the rind is.
  • The profile of a quarter to show what it looks like after I have eaten it.

   
   
   
   
   


I decided not to cut the rind off, as I do with a cantaloupe, since the rind was thin and tough. Instead, I elected to eat my way down to the rind. I took my first bite and found that this melon was crunchy, almost like a carrot. Its taste was totally bland. No taste at all, and no juiciness. I found it easy to gnaw so that only the rind was left. This melon was totally unsatisfying. I only ate one quarter; I'll see if I can get my neighbors Rob and Julee to take the rest. I will represent it as the overflow from the Fruit Explorer's horn of plenty. I rescued my lunch by eating a large navel orange.

The verdict: I have been seeing Korean melons at H Mart for many months, and I don't know when the season is. My unhappy experience leads me to speculate that my Korean melon was not ripe. I don't know what rule of thumb to use to tell when it is ripe. Until I find a way to tell when this melon is ripe, I am going to avoid this expensive little visual delight.

Here are pictures of the Korean melon in the field.
  • The flower of a cultivar that is closely related to the Korean melon.
  • Ripe Korean melons on the vine.
  • Close-up of ripe Korean melons on the vine.
         


There is a small amount of Korean melon art.
  • Decorated Korean melon halves.
  • A bunny made of fruits and vegetables, with a cantaloupe(?) body and a Korean melon head.
   

[Continued in Part 2]

The Fruit Explorer Encounters Two Muskmelons, Part 2 of 3

[Continued from Part 1]

Hami Melon

My Hami melon (PLU #3623) weighed 2.58 pounds, so at $0.99 per pound, it cost $2.55. This melon is named after the city in northwest China near the Mongolian border. In the first picture of China below, Hami prefecture in red, is part of the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in orange. Mongolia is the almost semi-circular area that nestles down into China. In the second picture, the city of Hami is marked with a red dot.


   


It is said that there are more than 180 varieties of Hami melons, so there is considerable variation in size, color, pattern, and shape. As the pictures below from the Internet show, the hami melon has reticulated skin.


   
   


Here are pictures of my Hami melon.
  • The uncut melon sitting on my cutting board.
  • Cut into halves.
  • Cut into a half and two quarters with the seeds removed. With some melons, removing the seeds is a problem; with a hami, however, the seeds are only loosely connected with the rest of the melon, and you can easily whisk them out with a spoon in just a few seconds.

   
   


The Hami melon looks somewhat like a cantaloupe on the outside with its reticulated surface. When you cut it open, it still looks like a cantaloupe. The taste is much the same as a cantaloupe, though perhaps a little bit milder, and it is perhaps somewhat juicier. I ate this melon by scooping bites out with a spoon. After lunch I easily ate half of this melon at a sitting. This melon is good: I can see why in ancient times the Chinese emperor demanded that the people of Hami send him a supply of this melon as tribute.

The verdict is that the Hami melon is an alternate way to obtain the cantaloupe experience. If you like cantaloupe, then your have just added a new melon to your bag of tricks. You can make your buying decisions based on availability and cost. 

Here are pictures showing Hami melons in the field.


   
   
   
   
   


Artists have given some attention to the Hami. The last picture shows a hami melon plush stuffed toy.


   

[Continued in Part 3]
   

The Fruit Explorer Encounters Two Muskmelons, Part 3 of 3

[Continued from Part 2]

Travel Tip

Your travel tip is to visit the city of Hami, which bases its identity on this melon, and take in the Honey-tour Hami Melon Festival, which takes place every July. Here is a picture of tourists having a good time. As you can see, some Hami melons are as big as jack fruit.




Here is a description of the festival followed by the picture of a Hami melon that is 13.9 meters (45 feet) long.

A 13.9-meter long, 8-meter high Hami melon model with a diameter of 7.5 metersinvites visitors to the Ninth Honey-tour Hami Melon Festival in the city of Hami in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on July 12. During the festival 128 types of Hami melons will be showcased and 20 tons of Hami melons will be offered to tourists for free.






Among the attractions are a Hami melon sculpture contest. Pictured below are entrants from the 2012 contest: "Flying Hami," an Islamic castle, and a flower basket.


   
   

Finally, don't miss the actors who put on a Hami melon drama. Judging from the picture, in this scene papa melon is being entreated to give his sons their inheritance without making them wait.





Gift Idea

Give the artist in your life the ability to create fruit art works such as the ones pictured above by giving him or her a fruit carving knife.  You can get one for only $3.34 (free shipping!) at this siteHere are some pictures.
  • The knife.
  • A close-up of the carving end.
  • An illustration of how to use the scoop on the other end to create melon balls, which can be used as all-purpose ornaments. Note from the first picture the hole in the scoop, which allows the juice to drain. This is the same design used by an olive spoon.

      

A Muskmelon Liqueur

Midori is a green liqueur made from muskmelon. I have been unable to definitively determine which muskmelon is used, though there are indications that it is the honeydew melon. See this site for 283 drink recipes that use Midori, including the Loch Ness Monster, the Mellow Hiker, and the Kryptonite. "Midori" means green in Japanese.

Friday, June 19, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Encounters the Ya Pear

To All,

At H Mart on 4 Nov 2014 I secured a package of four off-brand pears. The sticker on the fruit called it a sand pear, while the label on the package and the sign on the display called it a ya pear. I will go with "ya pear." I conjecture that the album released in 1970 by the Rolling Stones titled, "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out," was really a plea to grocers to display their ya pears more prominently. This pear's English name came from its looking like a ball of sand; its color is a pale yellow, almost white, speckled with innumerable tiny brown dots.

The pictures below show my ya pear, which is the same size and shape as a largish apple.
  • On my cutting board.
  • Cut in half so you can see the core. 
  • Cut into strips, which I ate (except for the strip containing the core, which I nibbled and then threw away).

   
   


Pears and apples present no new morphological challenges, so I ate this pear in a straightforward way with no perplexities or surprises.

The first thing you notice is that the ya pear is crunchy like an apple rather than soft like a pear. The taste is not as strong as a pear; while subtle, however, it is an interesting taste that is unlike any other taste I can think of. If I had to describe the ya pear experience in one word, I would choose "refreshing." If you are thinking of starting a toothpaste company, you should consider making ya pear your signature taste.

If I had been blindfolded, fed a ya pear without my knowing what it was, and asked if it was an apple or pear, my analysis would have proceeded as follows. It is crunchy like an apple, and its taste is sui generis. Therefore, it is an apple.

The verdict: At about a buck for a good-sized ya pear, the cost is roughly the same (maybe a little more) than that of an apple or standard pear, and the taste is appealing. Moreover, they are quick and easy to eat. Therefore, if you can find ya pears, they are worth a try.

Your party tip is to play fruit charades. This is like standard charades except that all of the target phrases are fruits, e.g., banana split, pineapple upside down cake, apple of his eye, pear-shaped tones, Kiwi shoe polish, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, banana nose, who gives a fig, "Clockwork Orange," the Big Apple, Prince of Orange, "Put the Lime in the Coconut," and peel the grape. Video your guests as they act out each fruit phrase. Later, use these videos to blackmail them.

This pear is imported from China. In 1991 China petitioned to be allowed to import the ya pear into Australia, and you can look at the 1998report on the dangers posed by this fruit and the precautions that the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service required before this fruit was allowed into Australia. This gives us a look into the regulatory side of fruit, which usually we do not glimpse.

Rick

Appendix: What Did I Just Eat?

Read this appendix only if you obsess over knowing exactly what it is that you eat.

You might be wondering why, in contrast to my usual practice, I included no pictures of the ya pear from the Internet. The Internet is careless, and I always need to use care to make sure that the pictures I show are actually pictures of the advertised fruit. In this case, however, the pictures were all over the map, and I couldn't find any pictures that I could say with a fair degree of certainty were of the ya pear. Worse than this, when I went to the Internet to see what I could find out about this pear, I had a hard time finding out exactly what it was that I had just eaten. The term "sand pear" appears to be applied to the Asian Pear (Pyrus pyrifolia), on which I reported on May 16. My ya/sand pear looked somewhat like the Asian pear, but it was much lighter than the Asian pears I have seen, and the taste was not the same. The term "ya pear" is often applied to what is usually called the Chinese white pear (Pyrus bretschneideri). After digesting the ambiguities that assailed me, my conjecture is that what I ate was a hybrid of these two species, though it might be that I just had a cultivar of the Asian pear. In short, the sand or ya pear sold by H Mart is caught in a swirl of taxonomic uncertainty.

To try to reduce this uncertainty, I did a couple of comparisons. First, below are two pictures from the Internet of the Chinese white pear, which is called the ya pear; it is seen that it differs considerably from what I bought in that it is pear-shaped. The color seems to be variable.


   



Second, I bought an Asian Pear and did a side-by-side test. Below are pictures of wholes and halves of the Asian pear (on the left) and ya pear (on the right). In looks, they both have an apple shape rather than a pear shape, and they are roughly the same size. Both are spotted. The only visible exterior difference is that the Asian pear is somewhat darker. When cut in half, I could see no significant difference. I then alternated taking tastes. There were two clear differences. First, while both are crunchy, the ya pear is crunchier, much like an apple. Second, the Asian pear has a stronger pear flavor. Therefore, if we consider a continuum with an ideal pear at one end and an ideal apple at the other, both the Asian and ya pears are somewhere in the middle due to their shape and crunchiness, the flavor and crunchiness the Asian pear is more toward the pear end of the continuum and the ya pear is more toward the apple end. After this test, I still subscribed to the conjecture above that I ate a hybrid of the Chinese white pear and the Asian pear.


   
   


This is a good example of how using common names can cause ambiguity. The catch is that, despite what scientists often claim, scientific names can also be ambiguous since they can can be hard to apply, especially when there are hybrids, but I won't go into this now, having already exhausted your patience in my weeks-long discussion of citrus hybrids (see, e.g., the e-mail on citrus evolution, 17 Apr 2015). Moreover, scientific names can change over time in confusing ways,

[Addendum: The above was, except for small revisions, written in Nov 2014; I didn't send it out because of my confusion over what I had eaten. The following was added in Jun 2015.] Two things have changed since I wrote the above. First, I have discovered PLU stickers (e-mail of 9 Dec 2014). I can look back at "Sticker Shock" (9 Dec 2014) and see that the PLU number for the ya pear that I bought last November is 4407 (see the picture below, which is a detail taken from "Sticker Shock"), for which the PLU site, gives the following information:
  • Commodity: Pears.
  • Variety: Asian/Nashi
  • Botanical: Pyrus pyrifolia.
The species name makes it look like I ate an Asian pear, but this is made ambiguous by the fact that "nashi" is apparently used to refer to all hybrids descended from both the Asian and Siberian pears.




Second, on 4 Jun 2015 I went to H Mart, and they were again selling ya pears; the term "sand" did not appear anywhere on the package, the fruit, or the display. I didn't buy any, but they looked the same as the ya pears I bought last November. I did, however, note that this time the PLU sticker called it a "Ya Pear" instead of a "Sand Pear." Moreover, the PLU number was 4890, for which the PLU site gives the following information.
  • Commodity: Pears.
  • Variety: Chinese Yali
  • Botanical: Pyrus spp.
This re-confuses the issue. I looked at some sites describing the Chinese Yali pear and at pictures, one of which is below. The ya pears sold by H Mart don't look like yali pears pictured on the Internet (see picture below). Moreover, no specific species is given. This might mean that this is a hybrid. According to the New York Times, "ya" and "yali" are synonyms for the same fruit. (This is in an article on what is called the Chinese fragrant pear, which it compares favorably to the ya pear, which is described as "...durable but mediocre, with tough flesh and bland flavor.")




In summary, I can form conjectures about what I ate, but I really don't know. My final conjecture emerged when, as almost the last thing I did before sending this e-mail, I stumbled on the Wikipedia article on Pyrus x bretschneideri. (The "x" in this name signifies a hybrid. This is one of the schemes for naming hybrids that I declined to go into in the e-mail on citrus evolution of 17 Apr 2015). This article  states that the yali pear is a hybrid of the Asian pear (which is known to me, 16 May 2014) and the Siberian pear (which is unknown to me). Moreover, this hybrid has been repeatedly re-crossed with the Asian pear to create a continuum of hybrids. H Mart is apparently selling one of these hybrids as the ya pear. The instability of H Mart's labeling reflect the confusion caused by this swarm of hybrids. In short, it appears that all this ambiguity in how to label a fruit stems mainly from its being hard to know how to refer to a fruit when there have been frequent hybridizations. This also explains why the pictures of these pears on the Internet show such variability. (Strange to say, the genome of the dodgy species, Pyrus bretschneideri, has been assembled.)

Don't let the haze of taxonomic uncertainty or the New York Times article obscure the fact that this fruit is good to eat. The problem is that in the future I might see a fruit and not know if it is the same fruit or not. Eating fruit becomes a taste in the dark.

Friday, June 12, 2015

The Fruit Explorer Ponders Mustard, Part 1 of 2

The Mustard Museum

I saw an ad in The New Yorker, 8 Oct 2007, p. 95, for the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. 

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This prompted me to visit http://mustardmuseum.com/, which describes the museum's genesis in the following way.

mustard museum? ABSOLUTELY! According to Barry Levenson, founder & curator of the National Mustard Museum, you can blame it all on the Boston Red Sox. In the wee hours of October 28, 1986, after his favorite baseball team had just lost the World Series, Barry was wandering an all-night supermarket looking for the meaning of life. As he passed the mustards, he heard a voice: If you collect us, they will come.




   
  

The museum, which was called the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum in 2007, has been renamed the National Mustard Museum to recognize its increased importance. If mustard is your thing, you can browse this site to pick up mustardiania. You might join the Friends of the National Mustard Museum, sign up for the Mustard of the Month, or browse the on-line store for hard-to-find mustards. A picture of the opening panel of the museum store is below. The guest shop sells more types of mustard than any other place on the planet. Don't miss the gift ideas or the Insane Deal of the Week.

 




   

    



When you visit the museum in Middleton, WI, be sure to stop by the MustardPiece Theater to view a movie that roams the globe to highlight the marvelous magic of mustard. Taste hundreds of mustards at the Tasting Bar. Admission is free. If you want to keep the mustard flowing, however, you are invited to make a donation, which is tax-deductible.

This museum is on the National Register of Hysterical Places. Even this light-hearted place, however, has its dark side, namely the ketchup envy that disfigures some pages of the web site. Also, the founder/curator/director says that those who prefer mayonnaise to mustard are "condimentally challenged" [Antol, p. xi]. (This hit home since I eat mayonnaise but not mustard.)

The founder/curator/director clearly deserves the honorific of The Mustard Explorer. We do, however, feel sorry for his poor wife, who is known as Mrs. Mustard and is expected to hand out mustard recipes.


Extremely Short History of Mustard

Mustard was known in the Indus valley civilization, which died out about 1800 BC. The Romans mixed mustard seeds with grape juice and called it mustum ardens where must is the word for unfermented or partially fermented grape juice and ardens means burning (as in ardent), and this gave rise to our word "mustard." In the tenth century the Romans exported mustard to Gaul, and Dijon became a mustard center. One of the well-known Dijon mustards, Grey Poupon, was established in 1866 when Mr. Grey (the mustard expert) and Mr. Poupon (the investor) became business partners.. The first application of mustard to a hot dog was apparently in 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, where French's mustard was introduced. This paragraph is based on Wikipedia.

The Botany of Mustard

Start with some botanical terminology. In modern nomenclature, a botanical family is named after the most prominent genus in the family with an added suffix of -aceae. The most prominent genus in the family that includes the mustards is Brassica, so the family name is Brassicaceae. We have seen this suffix before in the family Rutaceae to which citrus fruit belongs (17 Apr 2015) and in the family Malvaceae, to which the cacao tree belongs (16 May 2015). Informal names for this family are the crucifer family (after the resemblance of the four-petaled flowers to a cross), the cabbage family, and the mustard family. In this e-mail I will follow common usage and call the plants in this family the mustards.

The easiest way to identify most wildflowers is by the flower since flowers are quite variable. Mustards, however, are different since the flowers tend to me very much alike; they are usually small, four petaled, white or yellow, and not too variable. It turns out, however, that the seeds pods are quite variable and are the preferred way to distinguish different mustard species. This is why a botanist who want to identify a mustard will glance at the flowers, brush them aside, and intently study the seed pods. It turns out that the mustards are very well represented among the wildflowers of New England. The picture below from a wildflower field identification guide [Newcomb, p. 145] shows a page of mustards. Note the varying seed pods.



The genus Brassica has provided mankind with a treasure trove of useful species, as shown in the table below, which is scanned from Langer and Hill [p. 167]. The species B. oleracea has been bred into a number of varieties that has given us kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. (A botanical convention is that the genus is abbreviated to the first letter when there is no chance of confusion.) One can see in the table other useful plants that are provided by Brassica, but for this e-mail we want to focus on the last three species since the condiment mustard is made from the seeds of these species:
  • B. alba (white mustard)
  • B. juncea (brown mustard or Indian mustard)
  • B. nigra (black mustard)


Below are pictures and drawings of white mustard. Pay special attention to the seed pods and to their shape (like elongated tear drops) and orientation (curve away from the stem). For scale, a full-grown plant is about 18 inches tall. The last picture shows the size of the seeds, where scale is given by grains of rice. Neither Mike nor I has ever seen white mustard, but the reference works say that it sometimes appears in New England if it escapes from cultivation [Britton and Brown, v. 2, p. 191.].


   
   
   
      
      

Here are pictures and drawings of brown (or Indian) mustard. The seed pods, which are cylindrical but taper at each end, form various angles with the stem but tend to point up. This plant usually grows to about a foot and a half but can grow to perhaps three feet. Indian mustard is common around Boston.


   
   

Here are pictures and drawings of black mustard. This plant usually grows to about a foot and a half but can grow to perhaps three feet.  The seed pods are roughly cylindrical, tapering only at the ends, and stick more or less straight up and closely hug the stem. The last picture shows the size of a black mustard seed. Black mustard is common around Boston.


   
   
   


Keep in mind that a seed pod contains multiple seeds just like a peapod contains multiple peas. Pictures below emphasize this.


   

[Continued in Part 2]