[conspire] CABAL (in-person + Jitsi Meet), Sat. Dec. 10, 4pm - 12m

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> It'll be raining hard, so this is an indoors CABAL gathering.
> You are still all welcome!  We will have hearty winter food, plus 
> whatever desserts I'm inspired to make with a large number of 
> Eureka lemons from a friend.  Lemon meringue pie, perhaps?
  ^^^^^^

Actually, _much_ better, these are (sweet, hybrid) Meyer lemons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_lemon  These are a hybrid
between regular lemons (about which see, below) and mandarins.
Meyers really are the best lemons!

(If you visit on Saturday, take some.)


https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/meyer-lemon-recipes/
https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/meyer-lemon-recipes-we-love/
https://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/meyer-lemon-recipes
https://insanelygoodrecipes.com/meyer-lemon-recipes/
https://www.brit.co/meyer-lemon-recipes/
https://www.sunset.com/food-wine/kitchen-assistant/meyer-lemon-recipes#scrambled-eggs-meyer-lemon-salsa-verde
https://cookingchew.com/meyer-lemon-recipes.html


If you want some differently-geeky reading, some time, browse
encyclopaedia entries about citrus species.

Quick:  Is orange a citrus species?  Lemon?  Grapefruit?  Lime?
Calamansi?  Tangerine?

Nope.  Not a one of those is.  Everyone of them was a human-created 
hybrid, some of them (such as grapefruit) created only a couple of
hundred years ago.

Every single citrus variety we know descended from crosses of two or
more of these _actual_ citrus species:

1. Mandarin (Citrus reticulata).  You know these, rather like an
orange but smaller, sweeter, and with a stronger taste.

2. Kumquat.  Smaller than a mandarin (olive-sized), a bit bitter.  The
trees are cold-hardy.  (I have one.)  Taxonomy is disputed, because
citruses hybridise so easily.  They used to be considered one species,
Citrus japonica, but recent genetic anaysis suggests there may be three
kumquat species, Citrus hindsii, C. margarita and C. crassifolia, with
C. x japonica being a hybrid of the last two.

3. Pomelo (Citrus maxima).  Big, and tastes like a sweet grapefruit,
which is no accident because grapefruits arose as a hybrid primarily of
the pomelo (accidentally crossed, around 1692, in Barbados,  with
oranges, which are themselves a hybrid).

At this point, we've exhausted the familiar (true) citrus species.

4. Ryukyu mandarin (Citrus ryukyuensis).  A wild citrus from Japan's 
outer Ryuku Islands (such as Okinawa).

5. Mountain citron (Citrus halimii).  Wasn't discovered and catalogued
until 1973.  Found wild across Southeast Asia.  Edible but sour fruit.

6. Citron (Citrus medica).  Fragrant, thick-rinded, rough fruit. 
Known in ancient Europe through trade and conquest.  Ritually 
significant in Judaism (for the feast of Sukkot) under the Hebrew name
"Etrog" (אֶתְרוֹג).

7. Kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix).  Leaves and rinds are used in Thai 
cooking, and others around Southeast Asia.

8. Mangshanyegan (Citrus mangshanensis).  Wild citrus, natives to the
mountain forests of China.

9. Ichang papeda (Citrus cavaleriei).  Native to southwestern and
west-central China.  Fruit is bitter/sour, doesn't have much juice.

10. Clymenia.  Lots of controversy about its taxonomy -- again,
because of citrus's hybridising habit.  See the Wikipedia entry
to see the arguing.  Native to Papua New Guinea.

11. Australian lime.  More controversy.  Found in the wild in Australia
and Papua New Guinea.



Some of the familiar citruses that are _not_ species:

Orange (Citrus x sinensis) is a cross of mandarins with pomelos.
Didn't reach Europe until the Moorish era in Spain, and wasn't
familiar in the rest of western Europe until early modern times.

Lemon (Citrus x limon) is a cross created in ancient times between
citron and bitter (Seville aka Chinotto) orange.  Bitter orange (Citrus
× aurantium) was a cross between pomelo and mandarin.

Lime is a term referring to any of several ancient-world hybrids, the
most common being Persian lime (Citrus × latifolia), a cross between
lemons and the "key lime" (Citrus × aurantiifolia), which in turn was a
papeda/citron cross.  Mexico is a huge producer of the Persian lime.

Our concept that "lemons" and "limes" are different things is mostly
an artifact of language.  "Lime" as a word in English is descended from
the Persian (Farsi) word "limu", which in Persian means lemon.

Tangerine is a weird one.  Notice you don't hear the word much, any
more?  That's because it was sort of(?) a marketing name, and fell
out of fashion.  A fellow in Florida in the 1840s named Major Atway
imported and grew a citrus from Tangier, Morocco, and called it
"tangerine" in US sales.  This varietal came to be called the Dancy
tangerine, which was wildly popular in the US because its skin peels 
off easily.  However, since the 1970s, it's fallen out of the US
commercial market, because it's too delicate to handle and ship well,
is susceptible to a fungal disease, and bears fruit well only in
alternate years.  But it's still grown widely for personal use.

Once the geneticists got busy on tangerines, they found that... well,
it's complicated.  Major Atway had imported from Tangier two different
hybrids, whose mixes are still being disputed.

Calamansi (from the Philippines) is a hybrid of kumquat and (probably)
mandarin.