http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/seasonal-food-and-drink/6729333/Clementines-a-sweet-and-sour-tale.html
Clementines: a sweet and sour tale
The 'soft citrus' fruit served up by supermarkets is popular for all the wrong reasons and threatens the best fruit growers.
By Rose Prince
Published: 7:00AM GMT 05 Dec 2009
Don't we want our clementines to taste? Photo: GETTY
Easy peeling. It is like a Just So story. How the Satsuma Got its Skin, or, as Tesco would have it, became an easy-peeler. If there is an emblem for nutritional short cuts, it has to be a net bag of cut-price, easy-peel, pip-free, good-looking yet watery soft citrus, piled high in buy-one-get-one-free mountains.
The label citrus can be confusing, but it is not deliberately so. Mandarins, tangerines and satumas, all of which are in season now, belong to the same South Asian family. Mandarins and tangerines are essentially the same fruit, although there are many hybrids of each, which is why they can feel and taste different. Their names, though, have become interchangeable, and are used to describe those various types and hybrids.
Only clementines, originally a North African fruit believed to be bred from a cross between an orange and a tangerine, are sometimes sold as a premium fruit with leaves attached. The tight, smooth and leathery skin of a clementine is usually an indication that there will be more zing in the juice of the fruit.
What irks is the peddling of convenience fruit. And, regrettably, it would seem we, the customers, are to blame.
Once it became clear to citrus growers that the British hate to peel anything and cant face pips in any number, efforts were concentrated on producing easy-to-eat fruit for a nation that must be strong-armed into eating its five a day. Even this week a new tiny clementine hybrid has been developed to appeal to children. Measuring a third of the size of a conventional clementine, the segments of a pip-free (tbc) Clementiny are apparently the perfect size for the hands of a pre-school fruit sceptic.
Am I the only person to find this absurd? We peel, the citrus farmers laugh. I will never forget an Italian agronomist asking what it was with the British and pips. In Italy, a fruit without pips is not natural but something to regard with suspicion, he said.
My first memories of what we called tangerines are of a fruit with a tighter, thicker skin, and a strong, sweet almost addictive flavour. They are likely to have been the temple or murcott varieties, a century old, and a strongly aromatic tangerine with plenty of pips. We waited all year for them to arrive in greengrocers, never satisfied with the canned mandarins in the school canteen. (Goldfish in saliva, we called them, watching in horror as the dinner ladies ladled them into our bowls.)
The fresh fruit eventually arrived in wooden trays, precious little gifts individually wrapped in tissue paper. Sometimes youd see a box of fruit with dark glossy leaves still attached. They were expensive there were no bogof deals then.
But the mandarins, tangerines and satsumas in todays fruit section of Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Asda are on permanent special offer.
The most irritating thing about the convenience fruit mountains, however, is not only the manipulation of the skin, but the use of pesticides. When the government-backed Pesticides Residue Committee (PRC) last tested soft citrus in 2008, 24 out of 24 samples were found to contain residues of agricultural chemicals. Nineteen of the samples were from outside the EU, five from the EU and 10 out of the total 24 contained residues of three separate chemicals. The PRC set maximum residue levels (MRLs,) and said that, on the basis of this sample, there was no risk to human health.
But peel is not a barrier to residues. The PRC admits that only 5 per cent of the residues will be found in the flesh of the fruit, so thank heavens few people eat the peel. But while individual, licensed pesticides are deemed safe (until they are quietly withdrawn), cocktails of pesticides are believed to be dangerous. One reason why fruit trees are sprayed is to reduce the risk of diseases that leave marks on the skin. We pay a high price for perfection.
Only if you travel to the citrus-producing countries of Europe will you find the fruit that is kept back for the home market, including rough- textured oranges and huge, knobbly lemons. Drive across the Sicilian countryside and every fuel station cafeteria will squeeze you a glass of blood orange juice during the winter season. The respect held for citrus fruit is just as it was in Britain before easy-peel.
Sicilian lemon trees have four distinct harvests. This was explained to me by Giulia Paterno Castello, as we toured her familys farm near Siracuse, Sicily, where the terraces are planted with every citrus fruit from lemons to the famous local species of blood orange. Here, the only spray used is blue copper sulphate, which is permitted in organic production. Paterno Castello is the daughter of the shoe designer Fiamma Ferragamo, who, when dying of breast cancer, retired to the farm and comforted herself making marmalades, jams and biscuits.
In Seville, the orange is so revered, every street in the city will be lined with small trees, all in cheerful full fruit through December and January. At the Ave Maria farm, in Mairena Del Alcor, one of the few to export organic Seville oranges to Britain (in the 1990s, pesticide scandals dogged conventionally farmed bitter oranges), there is an almost religious deference to the orange. This is not least due to the fortunes it brought to Andalusia, once the British developed a taste for marmalade. In the Carmelite nunneries of the city, closed orders of nuns make gallons of marmalade over Christmas, including a supply for the Queen. So much for her frugal breakfasts.
But farmer Dora Fraga, of the Ave Maria farm, says there are oranges, and there are oranges. It has long been recognised that the citrus fruit from this area is exceptional, she says. There is a high content of phosphorous in the soil, which increases the sugar levels of the fruit.
Dora Fraga exports 150 tons of her 600-ton crop to Britain and yet, while we recognise the special quality of Evesham asparagus or Cornish early potatoes, no British shopper will demand Mairena oranges. Few would know how to differentiate between the outstanding and the ordinary. Farmers such as Dora Fraga and the Paterno Castello family are threatened by the taste for cheap fruit. Prices are continually pushed down by supermarkets wanting to offer the bogof deal.
With few exceptions, there is no British interest in specialist citrus fruits. Unless we begin to ask for them and create a valuable market for the producing countries, they may cease to exist. A high price to pay for the modest joys of easy peeling.
Get real: a taste of the ripe stuff
Organic Seville Oranges from the Ave Maria Farm will be in Waitrose stores from January 8, 2010
Marchesi di San Giuliano marmalades, preserves and biscuits are available from Ortigia, 55 Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AX; 020 7730 2826,
www.marchesi disangiuliano.it . Home delivery available
Marina Colonna Olive Oil, the exemplary oil flavoured with lemon or mandarin, is available from The Oil Merchant;
www.oilmerchant.co.uk, 020 8740 1335. Home delivery available
Traditional clementines and mandarins, blood oranges and lemons to order from New Covent Garden market trader Solstice;
www.solstice.co.uk, 020 7498 7700 for home delivery
