Missives from a Market Farmer: 

Cucurbitaceae-Watermelons 

Missives is a series of short articles by Judy Lessler, a DFM farmer, on the history, cultivation, and preparation of the items sold at market.

 

  Writing about the history and nature of our food is an endlessly fascinating activity. One can focus on recipes-across time and cultures, savory, hot, cool or sweet; cultivation-planting, tending, harvesting, and preserving; marketing and transporting-tea from China during the Age of Discovery, soybeans to China during our As Yet Unnamed Age; form-leaves, stems, blossoms, hulls and rinds, flesh and seeds, roots and symbiotic bacteria; stages of growth-sprouting,  flowering, fertilization, ripening, abscission, and senescence; phytochemicals-amino acids, flavonoids, lignans, triterpenes for plant growth and human nutrition; art and beauty-drawing, paintings, photographs, poems, and myths; hazards-pests, diseases, predators, weeds, and thieves; people-chefs, farmers, consumers-like the Roman Emperor Tiberius who wanted to eat "cucumbers" every day and built wheeled carts to move his plants in or outside depending on the weather, or even explorers-like the Frenchman Amédée-François Frézierwho  in 1714 went to Chile to spy on its military fortifications, found a large, sweet, but delicate C hilean strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) growing in misty areas near the sea , took five plants, kept them alive during his  harrowing voyage around Cape Horn , gave them to horticulturists in Paris where they were carefully tended for years before they accidently crossed with a smaller, more robust strawberry from Virginia to produce the progenitor of all modern strawberries.  

When I began work this week's watermelon essay, I was overwhelmed by the possibilities. 

The Wikipedia entry on watermelons has this sentence, 

" Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is a  scrambling and trailing vine in the flowering plant family Cucurbitaceae."

In the first century Pliny wrote that plants of cucurbits, 

"...climb upwards...their shoots creeping along the rough surface of the walls, even to the very roof, so great is their fondness for elevated spots. They have not sufficient strength, however, to support themselves without the aid of stays. Shooting upwards with the greatest rapidity, they soon cover, with their light shade, the arched roofs of the houses and the trellises on which they are trained."

 

 With clicks, scans, control-F, and stacks of books, I might find a continuous thread describing cucurbits twinning through time. 

 

The 14th century illustrated herbal,  The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti has an entry showing a man crouching through a wall of vines, cutting and gathering a stripped, elongated, watermelon. The entry under this picture says the watermelon is "a suitable food for when the weather is very hot."  

It is. I might tell a story like this. When I was a girl, my parents grew stripped, elongated watermelons in the giant garden at the back of our lot. Occasionally, as a long, hot summer afternoon ended, my mother would pile large melons on the backyard picnic table. Visiting cousins, my brothers and I then gathered round and gorged ourselves as she cut and passed around large slices, sometimes carving out a pieces of the seedless heart for the younger ones who feared a watermelon might sprout from their ears should they swallow a seed. When we were done and covered with sticky, sweet juice, she would pick up the hose and spray us clean as we squealed and careened around the yard. Then she would send us in to dry-off, put on our PJs, climb into bed, and whisper about anything and everything.  

Dioscorides also recommended watermelon for children on hot days. He said one should apply the rind of a watermelon to the head of a child who suffered from heat stroke. I am thankful my mother did not have his recipe. 

I learned about the search for the Ur-melon (and the entomology and pronunciation of Ur). An Israeli scientist, Harry S. Paris, has researched the origin and emergence of the sweet watermelon. He says scientists traditionally use archeological artefacts, iconography, and literature to investigate a plants history and now can also use DNA and genomic evidence. He posits, with evidence, that all of the sweet watermelons of today came from a few cultigens selected by farmers about 2000s years ago. You might want to know.  

I have pictures of small, green, hard fruits that are thought to resemble the Ur-melon and was able to  downloaded a photo of Giuseppe Recco's   famous  Still Life With Fruit  painted in the 17th century. A beautiful watermelon is its focal point and can be seen here.

I know that Mark Twain once said, "to taste a watermelon is to taste the food of angels," that watermelons were put in the tomes of pharaohs to provide water for their journey to the underworld, and that   the watermelon became a hateful, hurtful racist trope to used denigrate African Americans during the Jim Crow era. 

There is so much, I cannot think what to say. So I am just showing you the still life and including one of my favorite recipes for watermelon salad. I chose the recipe because the facsimile of the 14thcentury herbal instructs us to "eat melon with mature cheese and salty foods and drink a fine wine, but not too strong; then eat some other nourishing food."

Always good advice.

Watermelon and Tomato Salad

3 to 4 servings

 

3 cups cubed water melon

1.5 cups tomatoes, split cherry or cubed slicing

1 small onion cut into thin slices

1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice

2 tsp extra-virgin olive oil

Freshly ground black pepper

3 Tablespoons gorgonzola or other white cheese crumbled

Mint, basil, or other chopped herb if desired  

 

Combine watermelon and tomatoes in a medium bowl. Mix lemon juice, oil, and pepper and drizzle over fruit.  Add gorgonzola cheese and toss.  Add salt if desired.