Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
really a lemon at all, although it certainly looks and behaves like one. It has a sweeter
flesh and a more aromatic peel than most true lemons. Discovered near Beijing, China, by
a plant explorer named Frank Meyer, it was introduced in the United States in 1908. Until
recently, it was believed to be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin, but DNA testing
has found that it is really the offshoot of a union between a lemon and a sweet orange. It
has wonderful eating qualities, but because it's so juicy and its peel is so thin and delicate,
the Meyer was long regarded strictly as a backyard fruit. It became a favorite of Califor-
nia cooks and farmers' market growers in the 1990s and is now available nationally as a
specialty.
If anything, limes are even more venerable than lemons. Their early history is clouded
by a confusion of names. In some Asian and Arabic languages, the fruit is lumped in with
lemons and other acidic citrus. We can be reasonably certain that the lime spread west at
the same time as the lemon and by the same means - carried along by the Arab conquest
and by the crusaders. The story of the modern lime begins in the sixteenth century, when
Spanish and Portuguese sailors introduced it in the Caribbean basin. With the ebb and flow
of colonization, many lime orchards were abandoned, and the trees were left to nature to
sport and cross-pollinate as they pleased. From these Caribbean limes gone wild, two im-
portant varieties emerged: Tahiti and West Indian.
In most of the lime-loving world, the West Indian is the preferred variety. It is a small,
round lime that is greenish yellow at full maturity, extremely sour, and intensely aromatic
and flavorful. It is widely known in the United States as the Key lime and is found today
in slightly different versions throughout India, Egypt, Morocco, Brazil and Mexico under
various local names. At the turn of the twentieth century, the West Indian lime was just as
important in the United States as it now is in the rest of the world. But in 1926 a massive
hurricane in southern Florida wiped out the lime orchards, and today this lime grows there
mainly as a backyard fruit. These limes also show up in Mexican markets, where they are
labeled "Mexican limes."
The lime that replaced the West Indian in the hearts of American growers was the
Tahiti, sometimes called the Persian (though, oddly, there is no trace of such a lime in
Iran). The Tahiti is much larger than the West Indian and largely seedless. Although the
flavor and aroma of the Tahiti are not as powerful as those of the West Indian, the tree
is stronger - resistant to many of the fungi and viruses that afflict the West Indian. It is
also much less cold sensitive and does not require as much heat to ripen. Prior to Hur-
ricane Andrew - which in 1992 devastated the area around Homestead, Florida, that was
the center of Florida's lime culture - more than 6,300 acres of the fruit were cultivated in
the state. Ten years later, only 800 acres remained. An infestation of citrus canker in 2002
