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.

                                                         

         

Needless to say, mandarins are well represented in alcoholic beverages, starting with a couple of mandarin orange cocktails.

                                  

The mandarin is popular in beauty products.

                  

[Continued in Part 2]

The Fruit Explorer Encounters a Mandarin, Part 2 of 2

[Continued from Part  1]

Let the mandarin be an inspiration to the cooks among us. Through the ages cooks have made heavy use of the mandarin when creating homemade dishes such as the following, which are pictured.

• ·         Mandarin orange cheesecake
• ·         Mandarin orange cake (4 pictures)
• ·         Mandarin orange bundt cake
• ·         Mandarin orange pie
• ·         Mandarin orange Cool Whip Jello Salad
• ·         Mandarin orange yogurt cake
• ·         Chicken salad with mandarin orange
• ·         Mandarin orange granite
• ·         Mandarin orange bacon-egg-spinach salad
• ·         Mandarin orange muffins (2 pictures)
• ·         Mandarin orange marmalade
• ·         Mandarin orange cranberry chutney
• ·         Mandarin orange strip
• ·         Dutch oven mandarin orange chicken
• ·         Mandarin orange soft ice cream
• ·         Mandarin orange Napoleons
• ·         Mandarin orange no-bake cheesecake
• ·         Mandarin orange and vanilla bean quick bread
• ·         Mandarin orange pumpkins
• ·         Mandarin orange pretzel salad
• ·         Crock-pot mandarin beef
• ·         Mandarin orange cookies
• ·         Chocolate hazelnut meringue tower with mandarin orange curd

               

                                                              

The following objects have been named after mandarins.  

• Mandarin orange zoas (a sea creature, see http://ragingreef.com/shop/corals/rrs-mandarin-orange-zoas-0)  (2  pictures)
• Mandarin orange garnets (2 pictures)
• Mandarin orange throw pillow
• Mandarin orange tuxedo vest

               

Mandarins have given rise to art works.

                     

Your party tip is to introduce your guests to a new parlor game. Start by serving your guests as many mandarins as they can eat. (After a meal I usually eat six at a sitting.) As your guests peel the mandarins, collect the peel stars that they generate. Once they are through eating, it's time to begin the game. Treating a peel star as a Rorschach blot, put it down in front of a guest and ask him or her to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Record the answer, discard the peel star, and proceed around the table, repeating the procedure for each guest. You will have enough peel stars for several circuits of the table. Once you have exhausted the peel stars, withdraw to the back room and study the answers. Infer each guest's deepest fears and wildest fantasies. Invite each guest into the back room one at a time, reveal the hidden mental barriers that have been revealed by the test, explain how these unseen chains have been holding each guest back, and then send each guest home in the possession of knowledge needed to burst these deeply buried psychological fetters. Free at  last, each guest will surge ahead in life and in later years will think back to your "parlor game" as the critical point at which their lives turned around and took off into sustained happiness and success.

The Fruit Explorer Encounters Two More Knobbed Citrus Fruits

To All,

Pixie Tangerine and Minneola Tangelo

You have read about the Sumo mandarin tangerine (20 Feb 2015) with its fetching topknot. Cruising through Whole Foods on 6 Feb 2015, I found two more citrus fruits with the same eye-catching silhouette--the pixie tangerine and the Minneola tangelo (PLU #94383). The term that is usually used, it turns out, is not "topknot' but rather "nipple," "neck," or "knob." I will use knob. (I did not give you the PLU code for the pixie tangerine, which its sticker announced as #3188; see the picture below of the generic sticker. If you look this number up at the PLU site, you find, "FOR USE WITH ALL COMMODITIES: Retailer Assigned." This means, according to the PLU User Guide, p. 7, that this is an unassigned code that a store can freely use for its own purposes. For example, if a store wants to sell a fruit that does not have a PLU code, then the store can put a sticker on this fruit with an unassigned code and use this code internally to identify this fruit.) The Minneola tangelo cost a flat dollar. (On Feb 10 I bought another Minneola tangerine at Trader Joe's for $0.69, and on Feb 12 I got a third at Wegman's for $0.75.) The pixie tangerine cost $2.49/pound; since mine weighed 0.39 pounds, it cost $0.97.

The pixie tangerine was developed in 1927 at the University of California Riverside Citrus Research Center and released to the public in 1965. The pictures below show the display at Whole Foods and an example of creative marketeering.

   

A tangelo is typically a cross between a  tangerine and a pomelo, hence the name. (Sometimes the cross is with a tangerine and a grapefruit, which, recall (19 Oct 2014), is a cross between a pomelo and an orange. (While Whole Foods uses "Mineola," Wikipedia insists on the spelling "Minneola" since this fruit is named after Minneola. Florida. The PLU site, Trader Joe's, and Wegman's all side with Wikipedia, so I will go with "Minneola.") The Minneola tangelo was developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Horticultural Research Station in Orlando, FL, and released in 1931. The Minneola tangelo is a cross between a Dancy tangerine and a Duncan grapefruit. Some marketeer looked up from his hash-pipe, contemplated the shape of this fruit, and gave it the alternate name of "honeybell," which I will ignore; this fancy name is apparently used mainly in gift baskets.

   

Now it's time to eat these things. Both peeled easily by hand. The pixie tangerine had a piercing sweetness that recalled the tangerines of my youth. The Minneola tangelo had a slight tartness. Both were seedless. My pictures show the two varieties side-by-side, with the pixie tangerine is on the left and the Minneola on the right.

• Both fruits unpeeled.
• Both fruits peeled.
• Both peel stars.

      

My Minneola was pretty soft, so I wondered if I had gotten one past its prime. For this reason, I bought a second one at Trader Joe's. I was careful to buy the firmest one in the display. When I ate it, the taste was about the same and I found that it also was unpleasantly soft, though not as soft as the one that I got at Whole Foods. Moreover, the Trader Joe's Minneola was full of seeds, and this made it something of a chore to eat. The one I got at Wegman's was also soft, but at least it had no seeds. (It turns out that if a Minneola tree is pollinated by another Minneola it will exhibit  low productivity but its fruit will be seedless; if it is pollinated by a different variety of tree, e.g., another variety of tangelo or a temple orange, it will be much more productive but will have seeds. Therefore, a grower must decide how to make this trade-off between productivity and seeds. As we have just seen, different growers make this trade-off in different ways. Unfortunately, you cannot tell from inspecting the Minneola in the store which strategy the grower has taken.)

The verdict: The pixie tangerine provides an appealing citrus taste, but, with nothing to especially praise or criticize, it joins the growing list of alternatives that one can turn to for the citrus experience. It is, however, rather expensive, which means that you are paying a premium and not getting anything extra in return. The Minneola tangelo is quite reasonable in price, but its taste is pedestrian, its softness is off-putting, and the possibility of seeds makes it unappealing. All it has going for it is its picturesque silhouette; it is mainly useful in gift baskets.

These two fruits are too obscure to have inspired art works or products.

Citrus Taxonomy

If you are like me, the farrago of faintly distinguished citrus fruits covered in recent e-mails has you wondering what is what. In a future e-mail I hope to bring some order to this mess so that you and I will have some idea of what we are eating. (With this crush of barely distinguishable citrus fruits, you are perhaps starting to appreciate why PLU codes are needed.)

Party Tip

It is time to determine how discerning your guests are. Put before them a collection of perhaps a dozen different citrus fruits. Their problem is to identify the mystery fruits. Have each guest inspect the fruits, taste test the segments, palpate the peels, and write down on the answer sheet the citrus fruits represented. Some determinations will be easy. For example, distinguishing the tiny Murcott from the monster pomelo is child's play. Distinguishing a sweet sumo mandarin tangerine from a neutral pomelo or a sour orange will challenge no one. Distinguishing the characteristic taste of the blood orange from the neutral taste of the navel orange will be within the capacity of many. Distinguishing the various strains of mandarins, clementines, and tangerines, however, will call for discriminatory powers of the highest order and will test even the connoisseur. Make sure that your guests take into account the following characteristics:

• Size of fruit.
• Number of seeds.
• Sweet or sour. 
• Secondary tastes once you get past sweet or sour.
• Juiciness.
• Smell.
• Characteristics of the peel (e.g., texture, smell, thickness).

Based on the number that each guest gets right, you will assign each guest a citrus IQ, and the guest with the highest citrus IQ will be crowned king or queen of citrus. (If there is a tie, hold a run-off in which your guests are blindfolded.) The king or queen will announce his or her favorite citrus fruit, and for the next year everyone will address his or her royal highness with the appropriate title, e.g., as King Mandarin Sumo Tangerine or Queen Cara Cara. Using your desktop tee shirt publishing system, you will immediately create for the winner a tee-shirt with a picture of his or her favorite citrus fruit on the front and his or her title on the back. By forcing your guests to attend closely to the nuances of citrus fruit, you will start them down the road to becoming connoisseurs. Make this a yearly contest, which will inspire in your guests the spirit of healthy emulation that will spur them to study and experiment so that they can improve their citrus IQ and perhaps in the next year win the coveted crown of king or queen of citrus.