Cantaloupe

Eastside Road, October 4, 2011—

FAST TODAY: BUT as I mentioned a week or two ago, there's so much fruit around here we have to cheat a bit from time to time. Today is one of those times: in the late evening we ate a small cantaloupe from the garden.

I set out one plant, in early August I think it was, and we've eaten eight or ten melons from it. The first was, of course, about the best, and certainly the biggest; one by one the others have gotten smaller — but their flavor has held up remarkably well. Tonight's was quite delicious. I pick them when they fall away naturally from the stem; when too many come off at the same time, they seem to hold well in the refrigerator — good thing they're small!

The word “cantaloupe” seems to derive from the Italian town Cantalupo, a summer papal residence, as I understand it, outside Rome. (The Italian source of that name must be something like “wolf song,” or maybe “sing wolf”; I don't know what that would have to do with the Popes.) I suppose the odd English spelling has to do with our getting the word by way of France.

Cantaloupes are, of course, cucurbits, like squash and cucumbers and gourds; and that is a very interesting family. People have strong attitudes toward cucurbits. Years ago I read a book that investigates the extent to which those attitudes have influenced language: Ralf Norrman's Nature and Language: a semotic study of cucurbits in literature. As I read it I thought it the most tedious book I'd ever encountered, but a review on Librarything, that indispensable website, persuades me that I was inattentive and, as usual, humorless; perhaps I should take it up again:

The text includes eleven black-and-white plates as illustration, the references are copious and informative, and the material on cucurbits and courtship, ranging as it does through Tolstoy, Ken Kesey, and Dickens is indicative of a fascinating exploration of our human curiosity about the plant world and its incorporation into the works of creative imagination.