| Mandarins: Oh My Darling, Clementine! | |
by Judy Sobeloff, from the January 2004 newsletter
I had it all planned out, how I would pose a Big Question and then resolve it a few paragraphs later, how the townsfolk would sing my praises and finally I would get to ride on a float in a parade. My round orange costume would not be flattering, but the shouts of joy from the crowd as I tossed them their sweet, usually seedless, easily peeled fruit would make up for that.
My question, O Winter Citrus Eaters, is as follows: What’s the difference between mandarins and satsumas and clementines and tangerines? I set off—imagine the bounce in my step, if you will—envisioning a large room of grateful taste-testers. “Quel surprise” when I got to the Co-op produce department and saw boxes of “satsuma mandarins” over here, bins of “clementine tangerines” over there. What, my work already halved? Clearly someone had trod this terrain before.
Turns out the satsuma, clementine, and tangerine are all distinct types of mandarin oranges. Thus, just as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, all tangerines are mandarins but not all mandarins are tangerines. Older and wiser now, while I’m still not sure I could pick each of the three out of a line-up, I did learn about the origins of their names. The term “mandarin” refers to the “bright orange robes worn by the mandarins, public officials of the ancient Chinese court.” Cultivated for over 3,000 years in China before they were exported to Europe and North America in the 19th century, mandarin oranges in China were “often reserved strictly for the privileged class” (homecooking.about.com).
The first mandarin exports were shipped from the city of Tangiers in Morocco, giving rise to the name “tangerine,” the variety most common in the United States, which has seeds and is apparently less sweet than the others. Satsumas (or, in street lingo, “sumas,” a term coined by Brigit, 22 months), are the major mandarin cultivar of Japan, believed to have originated in the Satsuma province. Clementines, purportedly “smaller, more tender and sweeter and more silk-fleshed” (specialtyproduce.com), are a hybrid of tangerines and oranges inadvertently developed in Algeria in 1902 by a French missionary, Father Clement Rodier.
The little fellers—by any name—are such a favorite snack of mine that the prospect of using them in a recipe was hardly inviting, especially with the parade called off.
As Mark Bittman writes in How to Cook Everything, “Perhaps even more than the banana and the apple, the clementine is the ideal snack fruit.… The delicate flavor of tangerines never survives cooking, so there are few cooked recipes for them worth considering.”
In fact, the longer I scanned recipes, most of which called for canned mandarins, the more I wanted to grab my box of fresh mandarins and run—until I learned that they keep better when refrigerated, which would have made running with them difficult.
A recipe for mandarin-lime sorbet from The Canned Food Gourmet (a title I admit would normally intrigue my sensibilities) called for freezing the actual can of mandarins for 18 hours and then pureeing the contents with lime juice. Regardless of whether the can is ultimately discarded, as one of the great pleasures in eating mandarins is the ease with which they slip from their skins—hence the nickname “zipper oranges” or “kid-glove oranges”—I can't get excited about canned mandarins; I won’t, I won’t. Finally I recalled having eaten some tasty green salads with fresh mandarins and walnuts, but settled on making Ambrosia, a dish I normally would pass up at a potluck. To my great surprise, I loved it. My eyes are now open.
AMBROSIA (Adapted from Mark Bittman, How To Cook Anything)
Makes 4 servings
8 mandarins
Orange juice to drizzle
2 bananas, peeled and sliced
1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
Sugar to taste (optional)
In a bowl, make layers of mandarins, bananas, coconut, and, if you like, sugar. Drizzle with the orange juice and let sit for a few minutes before serving.
The mandarin orange is only one of a multitude of subjects about which Judy Sobeloff is perpetually amazed by how much other people already know.
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