Last month saw the Internet crowning the cucamelon as the cutest fruit to grow on the face of this Earth. The cucamelon, or Melothria scabra, native to Mexico and South America, looks like a tiny watermelon and tastes like a sort of sour cucumber. So it does not come as a surprise that the fruit is also known as Mexican miniature watermelon or Mexican sour cucumber.
But today we will look at the cutest fruit’s relative – the not-so-cute and trending cucumber.
The cucumber is believed to be native to India and cultivated for three millennia, later it spread to Ancient Greece and Italy, to end at the table of the Romans, who were especially fond of it. There are historical records that Emperor Tiberius demanded to consume it all year round and his gardeners fashioned some of the first greenhouse systems to answer his demand.
The crop made its way through Western Europe at the start of the 10th century and entered England in the early 14th century, firstly named eorþæppla or literally ‘earth apple’ and later gaining popularity with its Latin name cucumber-em, through the Old French cocombre. The first use of the word comes from The Wycliffite Bible, 1382.
In 1398, in his encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus Rerum, John Trevisa classified the cucumber as a herb, but it was only during the reign of King Henry VIII that the plant got its place in the King’s Whitehall Palace and a certain acceptance from the English population.
But that did not last long, as in the late 1500s a prejudice developed that uncooked vegetables and fruits bring summer diseases and should be forbidden, and the cucumber, itself, got the reputation of “fit only for consumption by cows,” which might be a plausible explanation why the crop became known as cowcumber (firstly mentioned in print in 1584, in Reginald Scot’s The discouerie of witchcraft .)
In the 1660s, Samuel Pepys reports in his Diary the news that: “Mr Newburne was “dead of eating cowcumbers,” and of pickled cucumbers as a “rare thing” (that is also the first mention of the word gherkin in English).
From a cow food, the cucumber evolved etymologically to a synonym of a person controlling his emotions, when the phrase “cool / cold as a cucumber” planted into the 18th century English vocabulary. The phrase was first recorded in a poem by the British poet John Gay “New Song on New Similies” in 1732: “Cool as a cucumber could see the rest of womankind” and most likely originated from the fact that the inside of a cucumber on a warm day is around 20 degrees cooler than the air temperature.
Might not be the cutest out there, but the cucumber knows how to be cool, both raw and pickled.
