A Fruit to Ward Off Evil Spirits

Squash pie and a citrus to celebrate

First, a catch-up on the dangling threads from previous posts. Remember those candy roaster squash the size of mannequin thighs?  Well, one squash goes a long way. It made two pies at Thanksgiving.  We used a simple recipe from BigOven, a blog and app that’s kind of like Pinterest for cooks. The ingredients handily filled two pie shells:

1 ½ cups heavy cream  

2 cups squash puree 

4 eggs beaten

½ cup white sugar  

¼ cup brown sugar  

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp ground allspice

Front and center: the candy roaster squash pie

The squash, sliced length wise, seeds removed, was baked face down in the oven and easily came loose from the skin. It only required mashing with a fork–no sieve and very few strings. I tasted the pure, baked pulp. It carried the essence of squash but sweeter. Not as sweet, however, as a Covington–my favorite N.C. sweet potato from down east. The baked pies were understated and delicate, not at all heavy. In the battery of desserts that were assembled at the end of the meal this Thanksgiving, the candy roaster stood out as refreshing, not cloying, with no whipped cream necessary. Would I eat this pie again?  No question.  However, I carried the other squash, which was heavier than a Louisville Slugger, and heaved it into the open arms of my Ashe County friend and master cook, Ellie Perzel, in the N.C. mountains. She says she plans to use it a little at a time in recipes calling for butternut squash.

As for the ongoing search for those sweet, red-fleshed Cara Cara oranges, it was not until mid December that I got a call from the writer Dawn Shamp reporting that the fruit had arrived at Harris Teeter in Chapel Hill. A few days later Jim Harb reported from Knoxville that he had found them at Kroger. Two days before Christmas I bought them at Food Lion at Holden Beach on the North Carolina coast. Bagged and tagged by Sunkist, these oranges are from California, not Florida, as in past years. They are smaller than other navel oranges. The pulp is as red as this morning’s dawn on the Atlantic, but the sweetness is a bit muted and varies from orange to orange in the two bags I’ve sampled. Refrigeration makes them more delicious.

Like a Rorschach test, the pomelo’s interior and exterior alongside the magnificent Cara Cara orange–a citrus celebration at year’s end!

The end of the year is also the time to find Pomelo, or Pummelo as it is sometimes labeled. This ancient fruit is the ancestor of the grapefruit, but larger, sweeter, and rather expensive, but worth it. Five dollars per fruit at Fresh Market or $1.99 a pound at Publix, I found. 

I first tasted pomelo about a decade ago when my longtime friend Carrie Knowles, a writer and artist from Raleigh, came over with her family for enchiladas.  She brought a salad that night made of pomelo, pomegrante, and pecans–alliterative, colorful, and refreshing. As pomelos have become more common, recipes for such salads abound online these days and feature other trendy ingredients, such as arugula, avocado, pistachios, chile, lime, and peanuts.  One even calls for pork belly.

According to The Oxford Companion to Food, the pomelo or Citrus grandis, “almost certainly originated in Malaysia or Indonesia” and also grew wild in China. It is one of the four original citrus fruits on the planet and the largest. These fruits can grow to the size of a volleyball and some weigh more than 20 pounds, but what you are most likely to find in the grocery was probably grown in Florida or California, weighing around two pounds. The fruit is generally wider than tall–so not truly round–and the skin is often pocked and the color a variegated yellow/green. 

The provenance of the pomelo I plan to serve this evening with grilled shrimp is Winter Haven, Florida, grown by the Roe family, who have run their company, Noble Citrus, since 1927. The Roes started out with tangerines and added other fruits to their offerings over the years, including blueberries and Cara Cara oranges. Their variety of pomelo is called “Florida Starburst,"  which may be more of a marketing name than an actual variety. Other Florida growers swear by a Japanese variety called Hirado Butan, apparently introduced in the 1960s.  Both have pink flesh, though some varieties of pomelo actually have white flesh. Regardless, it is necessary to cut though the thick rind and separate the juicy clusters of meat from the white pockets that hold them in place.

In the store, pick a pomelo that is fully yellow and heavy, which is a sign of juiciness.  Like cantaloupes, I tend to pick ones that are especially ugly and mottled to get the best flavor and ripeness. The pomelo, however, is not to be confused with the Ugli–a Jamaican hybrid of grapefruit, orange, and tangerine–which you may also find in the produce section this winter.

Blooms and fruit appear simultaneously on the pomelo, and can hang on the tree from November to March in Florida according to one drawling grower who made a You Tube video to promote the fruit. (Though this grower suggests that pomelo will not interact with statin drugs as grapefruit does with some hazard, a Harvard doc reports that it depends on the statin, so if you can’t eat grapefruit, don’t eat pomelo either. 

However, the healthful effects of eating pomelo have been touted for centuries. According to Frederick Simoons, writing in Food in China, a Cultural and Historical Inquiry, pomelo leaves are believed by the Cantonese to have magical properties and are added to the bathwater of children on New Year’s Eve to cleanse the soul for a year. In South China the skin of pomelo is also used in a soak bath to ward off evil spirits. Since you are buying a whole lot of rind, compared to the cache of sweet fruit in the middle, this is good news.  I may have a soak myself on New Year’s Eve.