After months of there being no pomegranates, I was gratified to see Whole Foods selling pomegranates for the bargain price of $1.50. Eager to follow up on my success reported on May 28, I got one. My first time with a pomegranate I was unable to detect the ridges on the outer shell, but, with another four months of fruit experience, this time I found them. Therefore, as directed I scored the pomegranate along the seven ridges and pulled it apart into seven pieces. My first discovery was that, with the pomegranate in seven pieces, each piece was too small to grasp and hit with a wooden spoon, so I was reduced to the stone age method of picking the seeds out with my fingers. Halfway through, I looked down at my shirt, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a host of pink spots. Stains!! Recall from the May 28 e-mail that the Internet experts consider pomegranate stains to be only slightly less fearsome than a fire-breathing dragon. Luckily, I was in the middle of washing clothes, so I had this shirt in the washer in ten minutes. This prompt action removed the stains. (I was in such a panic over my pomegranate stains that I forgot to take a picture of my stained shirt. Also, I took no pictures of this pomegranate since I figured it would be just a routine eating of an already tested fruit.) I finished up in an apron. In short, you would expect the second time with a fruit to go smoother, but with pomegranate I regressed significantly by being much slower and getting stained. I attribute this regression to trying to get too fancy. The road of the Fruit Explorer is unexpectedly rocky.
Embarrassed by my regression, I got another pomegranate. This time I returned to the path of utter simplicity as described at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=084ABt9q1n0, which is the video that Mei-Mei distributed many months ago. Here is the procedure.
- Score the pomegranate around its equator. (That is, make a cut about an eighth of an inch deep around its middle. You do not need to cut the ends off.)
- Pull the pomegranate apart into two halves. (This takes some effort, but it can be done. If necessary, score a little deeper)
- Holding a half with the seeds up, work around the edge with your thumbs to loosen the internal structure of the pomegranate.
- Hold a half over a bowl with the seeds down and beat it with a wooden spoon. (Use a heavy wooden spoon; a light weight wooden spoon will not do the job. If you do not have a heavy wooden spoon, a billy club could substitute. You will probably want to pause two or three times and re-loosen the pomegranate by working it with your thumbs or my reaching in and pulling out pieces of the pulp that are trapping pockets of seeds.)
This method cleaned the seeds from a pomegranate half in about two minutes, which is about a quarter of the time needed if you do it by hand as described above. (The ten seconds claimed in the video above is only true if you are content to leave half the seeds unharvested.) I have learned my lesson and will never again forsake Mei-Mei's method. In short, I am happy to report that my journey into pomegranate hell is over. I have got my groove back.
Now fully practiced, it was time for the Fruit Explorer to come out of the closet, so I took a pomegranate to Pepe and Maria's. I demonstrated how to score, loosen, and knock the seeds out of one half. Maria then knocked the seeds out of the other half. We used half of the seeds for finger food and threw the other half on the salad, which Pepe photographed.
Marvelous to relate, the Stop&Shop flyer for October 10-16, 2014, had instructions for how to de-seed a pomegranate. That such recondite information is put in an ad is a testimony to the power of fruit. They recommend that you score and section the pomegranate and remove the seeds with your fingers. Recommending that slow method is bad enough, but the ad goes on to say that you should hold the pomegranate underwater; the ad does not mention it explicitly, but the rationale for this method is that is avoids stains. This method combines the tediousness of removing the seeds by hand with the massive inconvenience of having to operate underwater. In a final stroke of idiocy, this ad does not use the word "seeds" but instead chooses to use the botanically correct term "arils," and this pedantic obfuscation doubtless bumfuzzled its readers. This ad clearly is written by an academic rather than by an experienced pomegranate handler. For the first time, the Fruit Explorer, whose strength lies in his ignorance, feels superior to a published fruit source, even if it is only a grocery store ad.
(The "Did You Know?" section in the next week's flyer covered mangos. It claimed that a red mango will ripen in a few days if held at room temperature. As you have read, I have proved by experiment (Mar 9) that this self-serving statement, made by a store that specializes in selling unripe, red mangos, is false.)
You will recall from my initial e-mail on pomegranates (May 28) that I nearly committed the howler of throwing the pomegranate seeds away because I had learned from the story of Persephone in Greek mythology that bad things happen when you ear pomegranate seeds. I only alluded to this story and did not elaborate on it since there was uncertainty in my mind, which I will now explain.
I remembered the story of Persephone from my reading from when I was maybe twelve years old. In short, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, had a daughter Persephone, who was kidnapped by Hades and carried to the Underworld. Demeter searched frantically for her daughter, and eventually found her. It turned out that because Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds while in Hades, she was forced to stay in the Underworld for a portion of the year and was only allowed to return to the world of the living for the remainder of the year. Since Demeter only let the earth bloom when Persephone was among the living, this explains why the earth is barren during winter.
While fact-checking my e-mail of May 28, I went to the two standard works on mythology in my library to see what they had to say about this story. The scholarly, two volume Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, pp. i.89-92, and the popular Edith Hamilton, Mythology, pp. 57-63, both covered the story, but neither mentioned the key detail of pomegranate seeds. This made me doubt my memory of more than half a century, so I did not tell the full story.
As the months passed and this discrepancy preyed on my mind, I followed the references in Graves, which led me to the original source of the story, which is one of the so-called Homeric Hymns. Wikipedia gives the essence of the Homeric hymns.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. The hymns are "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same epic meter—dactylic hexameter—as the Iliad and Odyssey, use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect. They were uncritically attributed to Homer himself in Antiquity—from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides (iii.104)—and the label has stuck.
In particular, the story of Persephone is told in the Hymn to Demeter. The Homeric hymns are obscure enough that they are not present even in my library. Thanks to the Internet, however, I was able to find the Loeb Classical Library translation of the Hymn to Demeter at http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/demeter.htm. Here is the relevant passage that relates the exchange between Demeter and her daughter just after Demeter has found her in the Underworld.
My child, tell me, surely you have not tasted any food while you were below? Speak out and hide nothing, but let us both know. For if you have not, you shall come back from loathly Hades and live with me and your father, the dark-clouded Son of Cronos and be honoured by all the deathless gods; but if you have tasted food, you must go back again beneath the secret places of the earth, there to dwell a third part of the seasons every year: yet for the two parts you shall be with me and the other deathless gods. But when the earth shall bloom with the fragrant flowers of spring in every kind, then from the realm of darkness and gloom thou shalt come up once more to be a wonder for gods and mortal men. And now tell me how he rapt you away to the realm of darkness and gloom, and by what trick did the strong Host of Many beguile you?"[Line 405] Then beautiful Persephone answered her thus: "Mother, I will tell you all without error. When luck-bringing Hermes came, swift messenger from my father the Son of Cronos and the other Sons of Heaven, bidding me come back from Erebus that you might see me with your eyes and so cease from your anger and fearful wrath against the gods, I sprang up at once for joy; but he secretly put in my mouth sweet food, a pomegranate seed, and forced me to taste against my will.
In short, eating a pomegranate seed resulted in Persephone having to spend four months a year in the Underworld. Later popularizations often state that she had to spend four months because she ate four pomegranate seeds, but this detail of eating four seeds is not in the original, as you have just seen. You can find many popularizations, both ancient and modern, and you will discover that the writers have taken great liberties in changing and augmenting the original story in various ways, just as with Dracula.
In some versions of the story Hades treated Persephone rather roughly; in other tellings she was glad to get away from her mother.
This story has proven to be a favorite subject for artists. I include a small fraction of the many available pictures.
From the point of view of the ancient Greeks, the point of the myth was that it explained why the earth was barren during winter. From the point of view of the Fruit Explorer, you can see why I initially thought that bad things happened if you ate pomegranate seeds, and this misapprehension was only exploded this last May when I tried a pomegranate. The moral: Knowledge, whether of the Greek myths or of other varieties, does not always help you in life. Sometimes it misleads. (We saw this moral exemplified above when I got tripped up by an unnecessarily complicated recipe.)
One can ask why eating should doom one to spending a portion of every year in the Underworld. One can also ask why four months. Forget these quibbles. The important thing is that we now understand winter.
You have to admit that it was a major turning point when Persephone downed that pomegranate seed. If she could have curbed her appetite for a few more hours, we could have had endless summer.
An open question is why the pomegranate was chosen to play the role of the villain fruit. Perhaps Anne can tell us if a taint still attaches to the pomegranate in Greece.
The story of Persephone exemplifies the resilience of fruit. Even though fruit, namely pomegranate, is responsible for the trial of winter, we have forgiven the pomegranate and celebrate it. Similarly, an apple in the Garden of Eden was responsible for the Fall of Man; this Original Sin has damned us all to hell even as babies Nevertheless, we have forgiven the apple and it is a favorite. Causing winter and Original Sin are two pretty big strikes against fruit, but fruit has bounced back and overcome these black marks. This is eloquent testimony to the power of fruit.
Rick
P.S. Here's my confession. A few days ago when I looked back at Graves to get the page numbers, I found that he did mention the pomegranate. I totally missed this in May.
