Fruit Explorer: The Fruit Explorer Encounters the Mandarin, Part 1 of 2

On 10 Feb 2015, while striding through Trader Joe's, I found a display of bagged citrus fruits labeled "Mandarins." This riveted my attention since I had been on fire to know what a mandarin is like. (Often these are called mandarin oranges, especially in commercial products, but I will follow the botanical convention and call them mandarins.) These fruits are surprisingly small. To my eye they are smaller than the clementines that are sold in wooden boxes in December. (I do not plan to report on these December clementines since I have had them in the past, and the Fruit Explorer only reports on new experiences.) The bag, which contained 19 mandarins, cost $2.99. It was labeled as two pounds, but I found that the mandarins (excluding the bag) weighed 2.2 pounds (35.10 ounces), so I paid $1.36/pound, and the average weight of each mandarin was 1.85 ounces or 0.12 pounds. This ties the Murcott (25 Jan 2015) for the smallest citrus fruit I have weighed. (I am putting aside the kumquats, which are only distantly related and which I didn't weigh.) I measured the diameter of a mandarin at about two inches.

Here are pictures from the Internet. The resolution of the last picture is too low to allow it to be read, but it illustrates some of the different varieties of mandarins.

Here are pictures of all of my mandarins.

The bag (front view).
My mandarins spread out on my cutting board.
My mandarins in a Tupperware bowl.

To give you a sense of the size of this extremely small fruit, here is a series of pictures.

A Mandarin compared to my T-ball Jotter. This usually useful scale is not wholly satisfactory in this case since the mandarin is so small.
A mandarin compared to a cara cara. This is like comparing the moon to the earth.
A mandarin compared to my tube of cherry Chap Stick. The Chap Stick towers over the mandarin.
The unpeeled mandarin compared to my silver dollar.
The peeled mandarin compared to my silver dollar.
The broken-apart segments of the mandarin compared to my silver dollar. Since the segments are so small, it is inefficient to divide the mandarin into individual segments and then eat them one at a time. It makes more sense to eat three or four segments together.
A single segment compared to my pinky. I think I have a future as a hand model.

The peel of the mandarin adheres tightly to the fruit, so removing the peel by quartering doesn't work well. You need to pierce the peel with your thumbnail and then with your thumb between the peel and the fruit you work around the mandarin in a spiral pattern. I call this the spiral method of peeling as opposed to the quartering method. Peeling a mandarin is easy but somewhat time-consuming, so the amount of citrus fruit you get per second spent peeling is rather small. When the peel is removed, you are left with what I call a peel star. Here is a picture of the peel stars from two of my mandarins, as well as pictures form the Internet of partially peeled mandarins. (No, that's not my hand in the second picture. That is some other hand model.)

The taste of the mandarin combines sweet and tangy and is quite pleasant. Since the mandarin is an ancestor of all oranges, we have in the mandarin the embryo of many of the flavors that later developments will bring out. My mandarins were seedless.

The verdict: The mandarin tastes good, is easy to peel, and has the boon of being seedless. On the one hand, the mandarin is so small that it sometimes seems that it's too small to fool with. On the other hand, its small size allows one to control with precision how much citrus fruit is eaten at a sitting. There is also the satisfaction of knowing that one is eating a fruit that is near the beginning of the citrus fruits (as explained below). On balance, I give two thumbs up to the humble mandarin.

Here are a few pictures of the tree, fruit, and flower.

In my on-going study of Citrus evolution, I have found that the mandarin is one of the basal citrus fruits. That is, many of the extant citrus fruits (including oranges and grapefruits) are descended from the mandarin (or, more properly, from an ancestor of the modern mandarin). This makes the mandarin of absorbing interest. (There will be much more on this in a later e-mail.) I had been frustrated in my desire to see what a mandarin was like, however, because none of the grocery stores had offered the mandarin for sale. Until now. But there is a fly in the ointment. While the label on the bag said "Mandarins," the sign on the display said "Clementines." While I could wave this sign off as casual human carelessness, there was a bigger problem, which was that the nutrition label on the back of the bag said that the serving size was "2 clementines" (see picture below). So the bag is self-contradictory, unless one assumes that "mandarin" and "clementine" are synonyms.

So exactly what is in this bag--mandarins or clementines? After studying this question, I have come to the conclusion that there is no clear distinction between mandarins, clementines, tangerines, and satsumas. To see the basis of this answer, consider the basal mandarin as it existed thousands of years ago. As time passed, mutations occurred to create different strains of mandarins. These strains hybridized, creating more strains, then more mutations occurred. Eventually, humans started breeding, which created still more strains, which in some cases humans were careful to preserve. All these strains kept hybridizing. The result is that now we have a swarm of quite variable but still closely related descendants of the original mandarins that are given names such as mandarins, clementines, tangerines, and satsumas. While criteria have been proposed to separate these varieties, these criteria are in large part arbitrary. The message: Don't go crazy trying to distinguish between mandarins, clementines, tangerines and satsumas since there is no reliable or useful way to divide them up; it is true that some like to spell out differences among these fruits (e.g., color, size, number of seeds, texture of peel), but these are analogous to the superficial differences between tortoiseshell, ginger, and tabby cats.

As an aside, clementines are named after Father Clement Rodier, gardener at an orphanage in Algeria, who circa 1900 noticed an unusual fruit on a mandarin tree in his garden and nurtured it. It is thought that this original clementine was a natural hybrid of a mandarin and an ornamental citrus known as a granito or willow-leaf. As always, there is controversy; an alternative view is that the clementine originated in Asia and is the same as the Canton mandarin. For all this and much more, see the treatment by the University of California at Riverside.

Since the mandarin is a basal citrus fruit that has been around since the beginning of agriculture, it has had an opportunity to work its way into a number of products. Here are a few of the commercial food products that contain mandarin, starting with a vinegar and a salad dressing.