ISSUE 42, MELONS, Part 5: Green Citron Melon
Green Citron Melon [Netted Citron]
The name poses a problem: citron originally designated lemons and limes, and consequently became associated with the green color of those citrus fruits. So when early gardeners were attempting to discriminate the green fleshed cantaloupe from the salmon fleshed melon, or yellow fleshed honey melons, they used the old romance language name from green citrus. Sometime in the 18th century, English speaking gardeners forgot the etymology of citron and felt compelled to preface it with green—a semantic redundancy of sorts. Ironically, citron has come to designate a pithy yellow citrus fruit, and citron melons have come to designate a hard fleshed small melon used exclusively for preserves.
It is difficult to document the first importation of green fleshed cantaloupes called green citron melons. “Green citrons” appear in grocers advertisements during the Revolutionary era, but they may signify lemons or limes. An 1825 ad from New Haven clearly designates “Green Citron” under the head “Melons,” along with Nutmeg, Cantaloupe, and Pine Apple. [Connecticut Journal (March 22, 1825), 4.] In 18th-century England the sutured, netted melon was called the Italian Green-fleshed Cantaloupe, and there is little reason to doubt the Mediterranean provenance.
For a period in the mid-19th century a deeply ribbed (longitudinally reticulated) green fleshed musk melon grown in the South dominated to the produce stands of the East. A Virginia melon grower of 1844 praised the Green Citron for its size, imperishability, and flavor: “It is usually the largest of all fine green flesh, is more uniformly good in all seasons, and holds its qualities at the approach of autumn far beyond any melon of my acquaintance: often presenting a bright green luscious flesh when all others have become pale and vapid.” [“Cultivation of the Melon,” Southern Planter 8, 6 (June 1848), 169.] A 1834 issue of the Genesee Farmer observed, “if gathered before ripe and kept in a cool place, [the melon] may be continued a long time in eating.” From germination to maturation usually took 104 days.
Bluntly oval, the Green Citron is thickly netted with a deep blue green underskin that yellows as ripeness approaches. In the mid-19th century it averaged 6 inches in diameter, and much of the improvement undertaken in the 1870s and 1880s dealt with increase in size. “flesh, thick, green, very rich, sweet and delicious.” [“Varieties of Melon,” Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 23, 270 (December 1868), 366. It became a market melon because of its productivity, hardiness in the field, and its uniformity of size and configuration. Normally a vine set six to eight melons.
If we are to credit the word of horticulturists such as Robert Buist, the Green Citron Melon was the variety of cantaloupe that enjoyed the most rigorous breeding discipline. The notorious tendency of cucurbits to cross had mixed many of the melons that made their way to market. Given the premium price it commanded in most city markets, Green Citron growers took care to prevent mixing, planting them in fields without other melons in the vicinity. They were often intercropped with Valentine beans in the northern states, field peas in the southern.
Because the salmon colored cantaloupe dominates the fields and produce bins of the 21st century, we have forgotten that in much of the nineteenth century green fleshed muskmelons were preferred. The Green citron stood foremost among a class that included the Pine apple, Green Nutmeg, Skillman's netted, Minorca, netted Romana, French Muscade, Malta winter, and green-fleshed Sugar Melon. The Green Citron would be improved into the major market melon of the East Coast, the Hackensack, launched by J. Atlee Burpee in 1882.