Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Mandarins (Tangerines),
Grapefruits and Pummelos
It has long been a fruit seller's dream: a sweet piece of citrus that has no seeds to spit out,
that peels as easily as a candy bar and that is available for at least half the year. Could there
be a more convenient snack food? Ironically, the newest thing in citrus is also one of the
oldest.
Mandarins (we used to call them tangerines) are one of the three original citrus families
- the other two being the seldom seen citrons and pummelos. All the other citrus - including
oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruits - are hybrid results of crosses between those three
groups.
As you might expect with a heritage so long, the family tree of the mandarin is incred-
ibly diverse. One leading citrus botanist divides mandarins into thirty-five separate groups
(and each group into dozens, even scores, of separate varieties). The signal feature of all
mandarins is a thin peel that is easy to remove, rather than clinging tightly to the inner fruit
as is true with other citrus. This trait is variable: the skin of some mandarins is so loose
that at maturity it touches the fruit at only a couple of spots; other mandarins are only mar-
ginally easier to peel than an everyday orange. The Clementine - the original "tangerine,"
so called because the first fruit was imported to the United States via the Moroccan port
of Tangier - has been around for more than a century and can be seedless. The Satsuma, a
Japanese mandarin, is even older. Most Satsuma varieties are reliably seedless.
Shirttail cousins include crosses between pure mandarins and other citrus. The most
popular are tangelos (Minneola being the prime variety), which are the result of crossing
mandarins and pummelos, which look like giant grapefruits. Tangelos are larger than most
mandarins but also are easy to peel. They usually have a small "neck" at the stem end. The
tangor, or Temple orange, is probably the result of a cross between a mandarin and an or-
ange, although some experts hold out the possibility that it is a variety of tangelo.
The hard part has been getting a seedless mandarin to market later than mid-January.
Until recently, the vast majority of American mandarins came from Florida and with the
exception of the Murcott (popularly called the Honey), mandarins were tough to find later
than Christmas. Even the Murcotts were almost always done by early March. There were
