Citrus: the Great Illusionist

Flavour variety and full of zest.

Gather round, one and al l; our show is about to begin. Prepare to be dazzled, prepare to be dazed, but we warn you – we citrus are masters of disguise and experts at sleight of hand. You think you know us, but no, you do not.

Behold this deck of cards. Pictured on each card is a different one of us: kumquat, kaffir lime, eureka lemon; satsuma mandarin, tangelo, star ruby grapefruit and Valencia orange. What names! What flamboyant colours and sweet, bright juiciness! Not to boast, but have you ever met one of us you didn’t like? OK, there was that bitter orange you had the poor

sense to bite into once – we admit, we can be astringent.

But all that variety is just an illusion. Here, pick a card. Ah! You got grapefruit, as large as a softball in your hand and bittersweet on your tongue. So dist inct ive and yet – what’s this? Your grapefruit is nothing but a cross between the pomelo and the sweet orange!

This sleight of hand, you see, is our greatest trick. All the variations, colours, shapes and f lavours of us are nothing more than a shuff ling of our four basic building blocks – the spade, club, diamond and heart of citrus, if you will. And, dear audience, can you guess the fab four? Not a chance, not a chance! They are pomelo, mandarin, citron and papeda.

They all have their roots in Asia, before nature and humans crossed them over and over again to create citrusy variety. Love to squeeze lemon on your fish dinner? It is actually a citron crossed with a bitter orange. Like a blast of lime in your guacamole? Nothing more than a lemon bred with a key lime, itself a papeda-citron hybrid. And that grapefruit-begetting sweet orange? It’s merely a combo of mandarin and pomelo.

Truth be told, we simply can’t help ourselves, folks. We cross-pollinate all too easily. Grapefruit pollen can fertilise the flowers of an orange tree; lemon pollen can mingle with clementine blossoms. One of our favourite pranks is when an unsuspecting human plants a lemon seed only to get a different kind of citrus tree altogether. Or one adorned with thorns and no fruit at all! We are remarkably unpredictable, in part because our pollen contributes different genes to every seed (similar to how two human parents can create an infinitely varied set of children). Forget pulling a rabbit out of a hat – with me, you have no idea what the hat holds!

You clever humans haven’t been completely fooled. To bypass the unpredictability, you learned to graft branches – say, of that desired lemon tree – onto rootstock to breed the exact varieties of us you wanted. Nifty!

You also decoded the mystery of our juice. Our fresh-squeezed nectar actually becomes undrinkably bitter in less than a day’s time. This was a persistent problem until World War II. Then some smarty-pants US Army scientists, keen to protect troops from scurvy, offered a contract to anyone who made a portable, potable frozen orange juice rich in vitamin C. (Simply freezing fresh orange juice turns it into a foul brownish liquid.) The US Department of Agriculture discovered how to concentrate the liquid without heating it, then – presto! – adding a touch of fresh juice for flavour before freezing the whole concoction.

By this time the war was ending, so orange juice was marketed to the public. But get this, dear audience: no

one went for it. That was when that old Hollywood crooner Bing Crosby worked some magic of his own. In exchange for company stock and cash in Minute Maid, the US company behind the orange juice, Crosby agreed to put in a good word for it every morning on his CBS radio show. “Ken, what’s on the shopping list for today?” he’d ask his sidekick. “Well, it’s Minute

Maid fresh frozen orange juice, ladies,” Ken would reply, “and your frozen food store has it.” Sales went from US$ 3 million to US$30 million in three short years.

And that’s how I became a staple on breakfast tables across the world.

Your attempts to preserve fresh orange juice without freezing also were cunning. As juice loses its freshness, its sweetness does a vanishing act – it literally disappears as the juice turns bitter. But your technologists had something up their own sleeves: additives that approximate the taste of freshly squeezed for that ‘not from concentrate’ stuff in your fridge.

One last trick to close out the show, friends. This whole time we’ve had you riveted on our juicy segments, distracting you from noticing ... the citrus peels in our palms all along. Now watch as we deftly squeeze them to release a fine spray of oils. Smell that? Those are our scents. Enjoy them by scraping our exterior or squeezing a twist of skin into a cocktail. Honestly, ladies and gents, that’s the zestiest bit of magic there is.