Crushing It! WORDS LYNDA HALLINAN
They’re a sour lot, the citrus clan. They’re all lemon lips and acid tongues, or at least they were until the mandarin and the pomelo got together a few centuries ago to add some sweetness to the gene pool. All the citrus we eat today share four common ancestors: the pithy citron (Citrus medica), mandarins (Citrus reticulata), prodigious pomelo (Citrus maxima) and largely unpalatable papeda (Citrus cavaleriei). However, thanks to plenty of hanky-panky and hybridisation, their family tree now looks like a complicated Venn diagram sketched by a children's spirograph. Take the lemon (Citrus limon) we all know and love for winter
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cordials, cakes and curds. Genomic sequencing suggests this most versatile of juicy winter fruit is a hybrid of the citron and the bitter Seville orange (Citrus x aurantium), which in turn is a pomelomandarin hybrid. The Tahitian limes (Citrus x latifolia) we squeeze into cocktails and Nuoc cham are the offspring of lemons and the Mexican key lime (Citrus x aurantiifolia), which in turn is the child of a Filipino papeda and a citron. Tangerines were bred from pomelo and mandarins, while tangelos are an incestuous cross between a tangerine and a pomelo. The yuzu's parents are the papeda and the mandarin; ugli fruit are oranges crossed with grapefruit; and the Ponderosa lemon is a citron-pomelo hybrid.
