| Pomelo, Pumelo, Pummelo: What Is It? | |
by Judy Sobeloff, from the March 2004 newsletter
Our baby turned one recently and is often found standing on tables or sliding down stairs like a seal, so when Fred brought home a large, soft, round piece of fruit from the Co-op, I was filled with a rush of nostalgia and maternal affection.
“What is it?” I asked, admiring its little freckles. Only its distinctive ‘I-am-not-a-grapefruit-so-don’t-call-me-one’ attitude stopped me from putting it to my breast.
“The sign said ‘Pomelo, three-something a piece.’ That’s the extent of my knowledge.”
“Let’s play basketball!” suggested our three-year-old.
Unlike with my other children, whom I had been eager to get to know, I bided my time approaching the pomelo. Perhaps I was daunted by the extraction process that lay ahead, having read, for example, that pomelos are “most often eaten out of hand by an individual diner [because] it is quite a labor-intensive fruit to prepare for cooking; might as well make your guests do the work to get to the fruit” (www.wholehealthmd.com).
I’m all for putting guests to work, as anyone knows who has shown up for a meal at my house on time, or worse, early, but when no guests appeared, I had no recourse but to separate the pomelo from its peel myself. The outer layer slipped off easily enough, but beneath it I discovered a thick pith reminiscent of dryer lint or cotton candy, like something dust- and cobweb-covered that one might stumble upon in an attic: “Look, it’s Great-Grandmother’s pomelo!”
Grapefruit, the pomelo’s more familiar descendant, is probably the only fruit I usually don’t care for, preferring any of the other eight gazillion fruit options that are sweeter, so I was surprised to find—later the same day—once the pith had been shed and the individual inedible membranes removed from each segment or “flavor cell,” that I really liked pomelo, its flavor like grapefruit, only sweeter and more so.
Pomelos originated in Asia and spread to the west when a Captain Shaddock brought the seeds from Malaysia to the West Indies in the 17th century. (For this reason the pomelo—also spelled ‘pumelo’ and ‘pummelo’—is sometimes called a “shaddock,” though personally I think shaddock sounds like haddock and is a sub-optimal name for a fruit.) Thus, Captain Shaddock also gets credit for indirectly developing the grapefruit as well, which is believed to be either a natural mutant of the pomelo or a cross between a pomelo and an orange.
Interestingly, the name “grapefruit” comes from the fact that the early pomelos were smaller (orange-sized) and grew in clusters like grapes, a fruit with which grapefruit has “no botanical relationship whatsoever” (www.samcooks.com). The name “pomelo” (pronounced PUHM-uh-low) may stem from the word “pomme,” French for apple, another fruit to which the pomelo is not botanically related.
The largest of citrus fruits, pomelos grow wild along riverbanks in the Fiji and Friendly Islands. While typically melon-sized, they can grow as large as basketballs or 25-pound watermelons. During the Chinese Autumn Mooncake Festival, children make the peels into lanterns (Chinesefood.about.com). Pomelos are popular for the Chinese New Year as well, seen as symbols of good fortune (whatscookingamerica.com). With this in mind, despite the largesse of the pith, I decided to get started.
“When life throws you a pithy pomelo, as they say, make candied pomelo peel” (www.newyorkmetro.com), so I did.
Later I watched my friend Michael, who wished to remain anonymous, painstakingly peel another pomelo and make a neat pile of pith, which, to my astonishment, he then began to eat. “It’s fine,” he said, acknowledging that he did prefer the fruit inside to its wrapper, and that his son, age seven, preferred the fruit to pizza.
The liquid never boiled off the candied peel as described in the recipe, leading Fred to conclude it would make a nice syrup, so we sampled the candied peel over vanilla ice cream. Bittersweet it was, like marmalade. My three-year-old, who spat the peel out before begging for more, summed up the taste rather pithily I thought: “Yum yum yum yum yum yum yuck.”
Michael, who liked it, was full of suggestions for adding brandy or rum or turbinado sugar. “It’s wild,” he said. “If you set it on fire, it would be quite good.”
Patricia Yeo’s Candied Pomelo Peel (from www.newyorkmetro.com)
1 large pomelo
water
2 cups sugar
milk chocolate (optional)
Peel pomelo, removing as much of the pith from the peel as possible, and reserve fruit for another use. Cut the peel into 1/4-inch-wide strips. Fill a pot with water and bring to a boil. Add the pomelo peel and blanch for 1 minute.
Remove peel and drain. Repeat 3 times, changing water each time (to remove some of the peel’s bitterness).
After the third blanching, refill pot with 2 cups fresh water and 2 cups sugar. Dissolve sugar over medium-low heat. Bring to a boil, add the peel back to the pot, and reduce heat to low, cooking until the peel is translucent and almost no liquid remains, about 1 hour.
Remove the peel from the pot and cool on a wire rack. Toss in granulated sugar or dip in melted chocolate. Store in airtight container for up to one week.
Judy Sobeloff is happy to report that all her pomelos sleep through the night.
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