Hybrid Marmalading

[omorka]

My favorite Filipino-Viet fruit stand at the farmer's market had some large yellow fruit they called Manzanilla lemons. They don't really taste like lemons, or at least, not just like lemons; they taste like citrus - with notes of lemon, orange, tangerine, and grapefruit, and they're shaped like uglifruit, which I suspect means that they're hybrids, probably mostly citron and pomelo with a little bit of mandarin mixed in.

So of course I bought two and ran them through the mandoline; they've been simmered with a cinnamon stick and are going through an overnight soak, and tomorrow they'll be boiled into marmalade.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Aren't citrus so divergent that it's less hybridizing when they're not a particular thing and more husbandry when they are well-defined?

Jim here would have hated the pointy oranges I got once. They certainly tasted like a lemon was involved.

Marmalade!

[omorka]

Citrus taxonomy is a complex mess. Most commercial fruit have genes from three or four different "species," but given that originally they classified kumquats in their own dang genus and they will happily cross-pollinate with any or all citrus fruit, the whole concept of a species kind of breaks down where these juicy children are involved. I currently have six trees that are all theoretically different species across two genera all in my yard. It's rubbish; the only visible differences at this time of year are leaf size and size/color of flower.

Anyway, this is a simplified version of the mess, but anything that has one of the standard lemons as a parent tends to get called "hybrid lemon," as does anything sour and yellow with sufficient amount of citron ancestry, which leaves the whole situation just as muddy as it was before.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I notice that mess has no tangerines. I'm not sure species means what they think it does. I'm thinking that the citrus have been breeding us in their image.