“These are all winter melons. This one is called "old lady melon." It is very sweet, very soft,' Karim said, running his hand over the melon's tight folds. Round as a football, heavy and full, its skin was ribbed like thick corduroy, its wrinkly stalk curved as a coat hook. Taking his knife, Karim carved a sickle moon from the seaweed-green melon, exposing, almost indecently, the melon's flesh, creamy as magnolia. In the middle, a tightly packed jelly-ball of seeds-- unlike watermelons, which have their seeds scattered throughout-- managed to hold its form despite the cut. From this strange melon came a uniquely robust fruitiness, mixing overripe pear with Bourbon vanilla. He held up the melon proudly, an example of the fruit in its prime, the cross-section of its seed house, glistening in the sunshine. In Uzbekistan it is the trader who decides when a melon is ready. There are no stickers ordering the buyer to 'ripen at home'. He handed me the slithery wedge and I tried to unpick the flavors as grievous wasps landed drunkenly on the scattered rinds. First, sherbet. Then a little honey mixed with almond extract and, finally, pineapple and the smoothness of rum.” TasteScentOld LadyMelonsUzbekistanCreamy Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels Source: Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
“In Turkey, better cooks than me do not waste the rind, instead soaking the strips in water laced with pickling lime, then boiling it in sugar syrup for melon-rind jam. Sometimes, confectioners candy the rind into glacé sweets. So intense is the sugariness of certain Turkish melons that vendors pitch them to customers by calling out, 'Sherbet, sherbet!' Some of Turkey's finest, most-prized, and largest, melons are found in Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of the country's Kurds, in the south-east. Dovecotes there, especially by the banks of the Tigris River, where vine fruits thrive in the alluvial soil, hint at the location of melon fields. Nitrate-rich guano (manure) from pigeons and doves is said to heat and enrich the ground, thus adding to the uncommon sweetness of the often tiger-striped melons. Camels once brought these weighty fruits from the field to the city. There is much to learn about Turkish melons.” TurkishMelons Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels Source: Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
“The scent, though, is its own feast. In the cutting and cubing of it, more of its hard-to-pin-down ambrosial smell is dispensed, rising up like fresh-cut grass melding with cool iris. Batting away the temptation to eat a few coral-red wedges over the sink, I indulge, instead, in the anticipation of pleasure, imagining how, when I finally get to it, the melon's singular watery crunchiness-- it is a cousin of the cucumber-- and its copious juiciness will be sorbet-like on the tongue, as fresh and awakening as a glass of soda.” TasteScentTurkishMelons Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels Source: Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels