A Season Of Gifts And Yellow Fruitfulness

 As the poet Keats didn't quite say.

We were eating some fruit the other afternoon and Bob asked the difference between a tangerine and an 'easy peeler'. I wasn't sure, so I have been down the Research Rabbit Hole and discovered so fascinating facts.

Tangerine is the old name for the Mandarin - and that is the generic name for citrus fruit from several trees. Tangerine is the popular term in the USA, but in the 1960s, the British fruit industry phased it out in favour of the more exotic term Mandarin . Older people [like me!] often say "And we always had a tangerine at the bottom of our Christmas Stockings"

As well as a piece of fruit, Mandarin can also mean the standard, official Chinese language, spoken by over 730M people, or a high ranking civil servant, or a slightly dodgy Lego figure. Tangerine is also the name of a deep orangey red colour.

Satsumas are a variety of mandarin, popular for being easy peeling, and seedless. In 2005 , Tesco actually launched a Save Our Satsuma campaign, because growers in Spain and Morocco were changing satsuma orchards for other more profitable options. Britain is the world's biggest importer of satsumas - parents love them because often children who don't eat fruit will eat these.

Just don't tell the children that satsuma, a Japanese word, is also the name of a type of land snail,

It can also be beautiful Japanese pottery, richly decorated, with crazing on the glaze and embellished with gold.

Well what about clementines, then? Do they have anything to do with the darling miner's daughter? Nope - they were named,  for the french missionary priest and nurseryman, Father Marie-Clement Rodier who grew them in the garden of the orphanage in Algeria where he worked for half a century. Originally he called this hybrid cultivar a mandarinette but it was renamed for him in 1902 a couple of years before his death.

I can understand why supermarkets like the general term "easy peelers"

One final thing - the mandarin is an "ancestor" fruit. There are three ancestor citrus fruits, and all our other citrus fruits are hybrids of these. The other two ancestors are the citron and the pomelo. From the citron [called etrog in Yiddish] are derived lemons and limes. The latter is also called the shaddock [named for the British Sea Captain who first took the fruit from South East Asia and set up plantations in Barbados in 1640] The grapefruit is a pomelo/mandarin hybrid [and do be careful, grapefruit can interact with prescription drugs] 

I found this chart quite appeeling!

We should all be eating more fruit!