Is it simply a giant grapefruit or a fruit of its-own? The Pomelo citrus is to be found everywhere nowadays but we rarely end up buying it mainly because of its “non-practical” size – too big to be eaten on a single serving and thus often ending up in our trash bins.
Though the Pomelo’s taste is considered by many to be quite the same as that of a grapefruit, it usually has a very little bitterness and the taste is more like a combination between grapefruit and orange. But contrary to the common belief that the Pomelo is a citrus hybrid, it is indeed one of the four original citrus spices (the other three being citron, mandarin and papeda), from which the rest have been cultivated, so to cut it short – the orange and the grapefruit are assumed to be hybrids of the Pomelo but not vice versa.
The Pomelo, or Citrus maxima (Citrus grandis) is native to Southeast Asia, where it is known under a wide variety of names.
Pomelo / Shaddock – History
In the English language, the fruit was originally named “shaddock”, by the British naturalist sir Hans Sloane, who during his mission as a physician in Jamaica, noted about 800 new species of plants. In 1696 his catalogue of plants was published in Latin and there he contributed the fruit’s name to Captain Shaddock, a captain on an East India ship, who according to Sloane brought pomelo seeds to Barbados, as he described in 1707, in his A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica: with the natural history of the herbs and trees: “In Barbados the Shaddocks surpass those of Jamaica in goodness. The seed of this was first brought to Barbados by one Captain Shaddock, Commander of an East-India Ship, who touch’d at that Island in his Passage to England, and left the Seed there.”
The existence of such a captain could not be traced in the archives of the British Admiralty, yet the story and the name are traceable.
Derivatives of the nowadays common spelling, such as Pomello, Pommelo, Pumelo and Pummelow started appearing in only the late 19th century, originating in the travel journals of the British naval historian James Thursfield, who in 1817 writes that: “The principal fruits in Java are coconuts, bananas, plantains..and shaddocks, which are here called pommelos”.
To come to the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) in Florida, where in 1939 we find the modern spelling of our word: “Such hybrids as the tangelo, a cross between the tangerine and the pomelo, or grapefruit”.
The etymology of the word “pomelo” is of uncertain origin, most likely it is an alternative of the Dutch name of the grapefruit – pompelmoes, which on another hand might originate from the Afrikaans pomelo (grapefruit).
An interesting fact is that the Pomelo fruit was one of the ingredients of the Forbidden Fruit liqueur of the early 20th century that also contains honey and brandy. But though the Pomelo seems to have a quite confusing, bitter-sweet etymology, it by no means shall be a forbidden fruit on our tables.
