Citron

• 1. Introduction

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  Ask for a citron in a French market and you will be handed a lemon. The French word for the fruit that English speakers call a citron is cédrat, and the two languages have been confusing each other for centuries. The true citron, known to botanists as Citrus medica, is a large, fragrant fruit with a thick, coarse rind. It looks like a lemon that has grown far too big. Cooks, perfumers, healers and priests have all wanted it. Where did this lumpy fruit come from, and why do so many languages carry a muddled word for it? What do people actually do with a fruit that is mostly rind? And why do Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu traditions each give it a place in ritual?

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• 2. Parent of Citrus

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  Molecular studies suggest that the citrus fruits on a modern grocery shelf come from a surprisingly short family tree. Most cultivated types arose from a handful of ancestral stocks: the citron, the pomelo, the mandarin and, to a lesser extent, papedas and the kumquat. The citron ranks among the oldest of them. Natural hybrid speciation, and later deliberate crossing by growers, produced the rest.

  The citron's own habits made it a dependable ancestor. It usually fertilizes itself with its own pollen, which leaves it genetically very uniform. Geneticists describe this as a high degree of homozygosity. In crosses it plays only one role. It is always the male parent of a citrus hybrid and never the female.

  Lemons and many limes carry citron ancestry. Those hybrids are far more important commercially than the citron itself. Lesser-known crosses include the ponderosa lemon, the lumia and a type called rhobs el Arsa. Some growers and botanists even claim that the Florentine citron, long treated as a pure type, is a hybrid. Whatever its exact parentage, the fruit behind all these crosses carries a name with a tangled history of its own.

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• 3. Tangled Names

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  Into the 16th century, the English word citron stretched to cover the lemon and perhaps the lime as well. The same slide happened elsewhere. Czech, Finnish, German, Polish and the Scandinavian languages all use a form of citron for the lemon. Armenian, Dutch, Hungarian and the Baltic languages do the same.

  The root is the Latin word citrus, which also gave the fruit's genus its name. In Latin, though, citrus or thyine wood meant the timber of a North African cypress, Tetraclinis articulata. Italian shows a similar overlap. The Italian name for the citron is cedro, the very word used for the cedar tree.

  The species name medica points to Media, the kingdom of the Medes, where the fruit was once believed to originate. It is an adaptation of the Greek phrase Median pome. The belief was probably wrong. The fruit did not grow natively in ancient Media.

  Across the Indo-Iranian languages the fruit is called toranj, set against naranj, the bitter orange. Both words passed into Arabic. They reached Spain and Portugal after Muslim forces took the region in AD 711. Naranj lost its first letter through a quirk called rebracketing and became the source of the word orange. Toranj lives on as toronja and toranja, which now name the grapefruit in Spanish and Portuguese. A fruit that few Spaniards now eat thus lent its name to another one they eat daily. Its real birthplace lay much farther east.

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• 4. The Road West

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  The southeast foothills of the Himalayas are the likeliest cradle of the citron. Proving it is hard. Neither seeds nor pollen are likely to survive routinely in archaeological digs, so evidence for any citrus fruit is thin.

  From there the fruit seems to have travelled along the shores of the Caspian Sea, north of Mazandaran and Gilan, on its way to the Mediterranean. The scholar Erich Isaac described how it was later cultivated in different parts of that basin. Many accounts give credit for the westward spread to Alexander the Great. His armies attacked Iran and the land that is now Pakistan, and the fruit is said to have reached Greece and Italy in the aftermath.

  Some traces may be much older. The Egyptologist Victor Loret said he had identified the citron in carvings on the walls of the botanical garden at the Karnak Temple. They date to the time of Thutmosis III, roughly 3,500 years ago. The fruit was also grown in Sumer as early as the 3rd millennium BC. It was cultivated long before any other citrus species.

  In the 12th century, Ibn al-'Awwam wrote an agricultural encyclopedia titled Book on Agriculture. It includes an article on growing citron trees in Spain. But the clearest early portraits of the fruit come from a plant writer named Theophrastus.

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• 5. Ancient Remedies

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  Theophrastus described a tree of Media and Persia whose leaf closely resembled that of the andrachne. Its thorns, he noted, were white, smooth, sharp and strong, like those of a wild pear. He wrote that the fruit was not eaten but was intensely fragrant. Placed among clothes, it kept moths away. Given in wine after a deadly poison, it made the drinker vomit the poison up. Boiling the inner part, or squeezing it into the mouth, sweetened the breath.

  He also gave planting advice. Gardeners removed the seed and sowed it in spring in carefully tilled beds, watering every fourth or fifth day. Seedlings moved to soft, well-watered ground. The tree fruited in every season, since blossoms stood on the branches while earlier fruit ripened. Growers sometimes raised it in pots punctured with holes, as they did date palms.

  Pliny the Elder called it nata Assyria malus in his Natural History. He recorded that people split over it. Some loathed its smell and bitterness, and others esteemed it highly. Houses used the tree as an ornament. Pliny repeated the antidote claim and added that the odour could penetrate clothes and repel insects. He also wrote that Parthian grandees seasoned their ragouts with the pips to sweeten the breath. Pregnant women were advised to chew the pips against queasiness, and the juice made a gargle. Pliny claimed that the tree would grow nowhere but Persia, a claim the Mediterranean orchards later disproved.

  Healers kept using the fruit through the Middle Ages, mainly against seasickness, scurvy and other disorders. In 1544, Pietro Andrea Mattioli's Commentaries recommended citron essential oil for preserving dead bodies. He also suggested it as a contraceptive. The oil, called oil of cedrate, has long served perfumers too, and its main constituent is limonene. Modern work has found that citron compounds act against various disease-causing microbes. The juice is rich in vitamin C, and the thick white rind yields the dietary fiber pectin.

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• 6. Anatomy of an Odd Fruit

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  No two citrons need look alike. The fruit is usually ovate or oblong and narrows toward the end where the style sits. Its shape varies enormously, though, because the thick white albedo forms unevenly. Where a fruit hangs on the tree and how its twig points can change the outcome. The rind is leathery, furrowed and clinging, with a hard white inner layer and a thin, very fragrant outer one.

  Inside, the pulp is usually acidic, can be sweet, and in some varieties is missing altogether. Acidic varieties have white seeds with dark inner coats and red-purplish spots at one end. Sweet ones have colorless seeds. Some varieties keep their styles after fertilization, a trait that makes them preferred for ritual use in Judaism. Others carry oil bubbles on the surface or are ribbed and faintly warty. A fingered variety is commonly called Buddha's hand.

  Color runs from green when unripe to yellow-orange when overripe. Growers should pick before winter, because the heavy fruit can bend or break branches to the ground, inviting fungal disease.

  Acidic varieties include the Florentine and Diamante citrons from Italy, the Greek citron and the Balady citron from Israel. Sweet ones include the Corsican and Moroccan citrons. The Yemenite citron and some fingered types are pulpless. Despite all this variety, genetic analysis shows a single species. It sorts the known cultivars into three clusters. One is a Mediterranean group thought to have come from India. The other two are found mostly in China, one of fingered types and one of non-fingered types.

  The tree itself is a slow-growing shrub or small tree, about 8 to 15 feet tall, with straggling branches, stiff twigs and long spines at the leaf joints. Its evergreen leaves smell of lemon. Flowers of acidic varieties are tinted purple on the outside, while sweet ones are white-yellowish. It has almost no dormancy and blooms several times a year, which leaves it fragile and very sensitive to frost.

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• 7. The Rind on the Plate

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  A lemon or an orange is peeled for its juicy segments, but a citron offers cooks something different. Its pulp is dry and holds little juice, if any. The prize is the thick white rind that clings to the segments. Cooks halve the fruit, scoop out the pulp and cut the rind into pieces. The thicker the rind, the better.

  In Greece, the pieces are cooked in sugar syrup to make a spoon sweet called kítro glykó. Elsewhere they are diced, candied and folded into cakes. Italy makes a soft drink called Cedrata and a dense, powerful liqueur called cedro or cedrello. In Samoa, squeezed citron juice becomes a refreshing drink called vai tipolo. It also goes into oka, a raw fish dish, and into a variation of palusami or luáu.

  In international trade, the inner white layer is the most important part. Food makers candy it in sugar and sell it as succade. Dutch merchants import it seasonally for baked goods from Indonesia and other countries, in thick light green half peels. They can reach 2.5 kilograms in mass. A salt treatment removes the bitter taste before the peel becomes confectionery. The flavedo, the outer zest, is also used for fragrance and flavor.

  Across South Asia the fruit takes savory forms. Dozens of varieties are collectively called Lebu in Bangladesh and West Bengal, where it is the main citrus fruit. In Iran, the rind is made into jam, and in Pakistan it is made into jam and also pickled. South Indian cooks use the Tamil Narthangai and the Kannada heralikayi in pickles and preserves, and in Karnataka heralikayi flavors lemon rice. In Kutch, in Gujarat, whole slices are salted, dried and mixed with jaggery and spices into a sweet, spicy pickle. In the United States, candied citron is an important ingredient in holiday fruitcakes.

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• 8. A Sacred Fruit

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  Leviticus 23:40 tells worshippers to take the fruit of the beautiful tree, called hadar, at the Feast of Tabernacles. Rabbinic tradition holds that this fruit is the citron. The Mishna Sukkah, from around the 2nd century AD, deals with the legal details of using it. The Hebrew word for the citron is etrog, which Yiddish speakers pronounce esrog or esreg. During the harvest holiday of Sukkot, Jews hold it together with lulavim, which are fronds of the date palm. The fruit has become a Jewish symbol, found on various Hebrew antiques and archaeological finds. The Bene Israel Jews of India call it Mahalum.

  Buddhist temples receive the fruit as an offering, in a Chinese variety whose sections separate into finger-like parts.

  In Nepal, people worship the citron, called bimiro, during the Bhai Tika ceremony of Tihar. The practice is thought to come from a belief that it is a favorite of Yama, the Hindu god of death, and of his sister Yami.

  The goddess Mahalakshmi is shown holding a matulunga fruit in one of her four hands. That is the citron, called Mahalung or Beejora-nimbu in Marathi and Hindi. A fruit once carried into the Mediterranean by armies and merchants is held in a goddess's hand.

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