Today was a banner day for citrus.
At 8:30 am, there was a knock at the door. Our landlord’s two granddaughters, beatific and bearing a basket of yellow fruit. Wow. Thank you. What a great way to start the day. With visions of Sicilian food dancing through my head, I inspected the fruit and noticed each one was slightly different: one was oblong with a thick dimpled rind, one smooth and spherical, two were plump bright orbs, and the last small and satiny and lemony-looking. It turns out they are all from the same tree and all lemons… sort of. They taste like very sour oranges. Definitely some funny grafting going on — perhaps a lemon tree grafted onto the rootstock of an orange? The world of citrus propagation is new and wondrous territory to me, so I was delighted to learn that grafting is a fairly simple procedure. One tree, say, a Lisbon lemon, could have as many as ten varieties growing from it! I am giddy just imagining this single magic tree with oranges, mandarins, satsumas, grapefruits, meyer lemons, kumquats, and maybe even kalamansi hanging in profusion! Here are my lemoranges:
Here’s where it really gets exciting… Today I tasted my very first dekopon. In case you don’t know (and this is really esoteric knowledge, so don’t sweat it), the dekopon is a cross between a Kiyomi tangor and a Ponkan. A Kiyomi tangor is cross between a Trovita orange and a Satsuma or Mikan. Got that? The important thing to know is that the dekopon is quite possibly the world’s most delightful citrus. To begin with, the thick, loose skin practically peals itself. Inside, the sections come apart easily and the soft, juicy flesh tastes like a cross between a tangerine and mandarin orange. And it is sweet.
Originating in Japan in 1972, the name dekopon is a compound of deko (which means bump, and refers to the fat lump on its head), and pon, from its mother the ponkan. Here are mine, purchased today at the market in Santa Monica. The time stamp on the image below is about 5 minutes PD (in the era heretofore known as pre-Dekopon).
The dekopon has been available in markets in the U.S. only since mid-January of 2011. Behold the intriguing tale of how it came to be grown here in the U.S., involving smugglers and government agents and secret business deals.
On my list of “Things I Was Surprised to Learn and Now Love About Los Angeles”, we find one David Karp. (This is the man I will now thank for bringing the dekopon into my life and into my kitchen.) Now, David Karp has what may be the World’s Best Job — he is the citrus writer at the L.A. Times. I know, right? He even has his own (suspiciously personal) wikipedia entry, in which his profession is listed as “pomologist.”
I first heard the name David Karp a few days ago while I was visiting E. Waldo Ward & Son, a three-acre orange farm in Sierra Madre, California that happens to be the last commercial citrus grower in Los Angeles County. Edwin Waldo Ward was a gourmet food salesman from New Jersey who came to California in 1887, hoping the climate would help him recover from TB. On his way out west, he had the idea that he would grow oranges and start making fancy English-style marmalade, which had been one of his best-sellers back east. His health improved, he bought 30 acres in a rural area called Sierra Madre in the San Gabriel Valley. A friend shipped him two Seville orange trees from Spain that spawned a grove of 600 trees, and by 1918 he was selling his orange marmalade across the nation.
Today the farm is run by Jeff Ward, Edwin’s great-grandson. The family sold much of the property over the years, but it retains three acres of oranges, the original farmhouse, and outbuildings. Over time, the agricultural lands at the feet of the the San Gabriel mountains became more densely settled and today E. Waldo Ward is surrounded by a grid of suburban streets lined with bungalows and large trees.
All kinds of jams, jellies, and, of course, marmalades are still produced here in the old barns on antiquated machinery (the burners are from 1915 and the citrus peel slicer dates to 1930). They also cure and pack various kinds of olives, produce pickle-y things, and make sauces. The farm and factory are open on the weekends for tours. And yes, you can haz marmalade.
Incidentally, Sierra Madre is also home to the world’s largest wisteria vine. In 1894, Mrs. Alice Brugman went to neighboring Monrovia and purchase the flowering vine in a one-gallon pot for 75 cents. By 1931, the wisteria had outgrown its arbors and had crushed the house, so a new house was built 200 feet away. Today it measures more than an acre and weighs 250 tons. The annual Wisteria Festival has been held in March each year since 1918, and tickets are still available if you’d like to visit the world’s largest blossoming plant at this year’s village celebration on March 20.
tripfield 