Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., March 06, 2008 Adar1 29, 5768 | | Israel Time: 17:25 (EST+7)
Pure gold
By Ronit Vered
In the beginning there were apparently only three: the etrog (citron), the pomelo and the mandarin. Today there are dozens of fruits and thousands of species of citrus fruit in the world, but modern genetic research indicates only these three as the family’s original primeval ancestors. In ancient times, the three existed in nature as wild trees; all the rest are the product of mutations that occurred by chance and received enthusiastic encouragement from mankind, or hybrids – the product of crossbreeding among the various species.
Some of the mutations and the crossbreeding took place very early. The orange, recorded in Chinese culture over 1,000 years ago, is the product of crossbreeding a mandarin with a pomelo. Some of them are later developments: The grapefruit, which appeared in the Caribbean in the 17th century, is the product of crossbreeding a pomelo with an orange. The Clementine is one of the babies in the family, and not only due to its size. It is named after the person considered its inventor, Father Clement Rodier, a French missionary who was sent to Algeria in the 19th century to bring the Gospel to the Muslims. But even when it comes to a fruit that came into the world relatively close to our own times (between 1892 and 1904), it is not easy to separate myth from fact. Nobody can say with certainty whether the monk and his colleagues in the order, who ran an orphanage, came across the mutation spontaneously or were involved in crossbreeding and therefore invented the Clementine.
Pierre Laszlo, a French professor of chemistry, has written a fascinating book in which he tries to trace the spread of citrus fruits in the world. This journey passes through marvelous stops along the way. There are the etrog orchards of the Levant, which spread because of religion, in this case Judaism. There is the story of the scurvy- stricken fleet of British Admiral George Anson, who embarked on a trip around the world in the 18th century with six ships and 2,000 sailors in order to prevent Spanish domination of the commercial routes. The fleet returned with one ship and fewer than 200 sailors, because his competitors were aware of the strategic-economic value of the secret of curing scurvy – lemon juice – and denied Anson and his men the simple treatment.