Kitchen Gardeners International: Forgotten flavors: Memories of Medlar
by Lee Reich, author of Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden
It's time for dessert two hundred, perhaps even two thousand, years ago. We have a platter of medlars brought to the table. The fruits resemble small, russeted apples, tinged dull yellow or red, with their calyx ends (across from the stems) flared open. Better yet, let’s take the suggestion of a past enthusiast and “send [medlars] to the table with vine leaves or other such garnishings . . . so dressed, medlars contrast well with bright, rosy apples.”
Open a medlar; inside, the flesh is as soft as a baked apple. The flavor has a refreshing briskness with winy overtones, like old-fashioned applesauce laced with cinnamon. Embedded in the pulp are five large seeds. We have before us a fruit that may have been cultivated as far back as thirty centuries ago.
Medlar reached its peak of popularity during the Middle Ages. In the ninth century, the medlar was included in the catalogue of mandatory plants for the royal estates in Charlemagne’s Capitulare de villis (“decree concerning towns”). Medlar trees were familiar denizens of walled monastery gardens of the Middle Ages, and fittingly, a tree is growing in the re-created monastery garden of the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One of the Unicorn Tapestries (c. 1500) hanging at the Cloisters depicts medlars. The medlar was a market fruit in Europe as late as the nineteenth century.
Today, medlar is rarely cultivated in Europe or anywhere else. The fruit is admittedly ugly. “A crabby-looking, brownish-green, truncated, little spheroid of unsympathetic appearance,” wrote one author. “Open-arse” and its variations “openars” and “open-ers” were English names for the fruit a thousand years ago, and allude to the large open disc between the persistent calyx lobes. Shakespeare’s Mercutio was more delicate with his choice of words, calling the fruit “open et cetera” in Romeo and Juliet. The French bestow upon the medlar the unflattering nickname cul de chien.
Perhaps the mushy, brown interior looks to some people more like a rotten, rather than a baked, apple. No matter, few people today have had the opportunity to sample this fruit so highly esteemed in past centuries. The only way to become familiar with the medlar today is to plant one.
Description of the Plant
In comparison with its wild siblings, the cultivated medlar has taken on an air of elegance, lacking thorns and becoming a flat-topped, small tree usually no more than twenty feet high. Not too elegant, though, for the elbowed contortions of the branches, so evident in winter, lend an air of rusticity that never allows even cultivated plants to be pressed into formal attire.
In summer, medlar’s elbowed branches are hidden beneath lush, green, lance-shaped leaves. Autumn brings warm, rich shades of yellow, orange, and russet to the leaves. A medlar in bloom, covered with large white or slightly pink blossoms each an inch or two across, is every bit as showy as a wild rose. Some European cities, among them Lochem and Goor in Holland, have medlar flowers in their city emblems. The blossoms are born singly on the ends of short shoots that grow in spring from lateral buds on year-old wood and from spurs on older wood. In contrast to those of most other fruit trees, medlar flowers open up after the plant has pushed out a few inches of growth so each blossom is framed and contrasted by the whorl of dark green leaves behind it.
Almost every medlar flower will set fruit. The blooms open late enough in spring so that frost is rarely a hazard, and the flowers do not need cross-pollination. Some pollination occurs in the absence of insects because as the flowers open, the outward-facing stigmas readily touch the inward-facing stamens. And if pollination should not occur, the medlar has a strong tendency to set fruit parthenocarpically, that is, without any pollination whatsoever.
For all the centuries that medlars have been cultivated, remarkably few clones have been selected for superior fruit. There are a few thousand cultivars of apple, yet only a handful of medlar cultivars. Nottingham is one of the oldest and most popular; others include Dutch, Royal, and Puciolot.
Cultivation
Medlar trees are hardy at least to USDA Hardiness Zone 5. The site for the tree should be sunny and the soil should be well drained and reasonably fertile. Soil requirements vary somewhat with choice of rootstock (see the following section on propagation).
Because of possible delayed incompatibilities between scion and rootstock, a medlar tree should be planted with its graft union a couple of inches below soil level. Soil covering the medlar scion eventually will induce the scion to form its own roots. This rule cannot be followed with a medlar trained as a standard by being grafted high on some ramrod-straight rootstock.
The medlar is an attractive specimen tree standing alone in a lawn. Because the medlar is a small tree, it is equally at home mingling with shrubs in a shrub border. Just make sure the plant is not shaded.
A medlar tree needs training in its early years to build up an attractive and sturdy framework of branches. Beyond that, what little pruning is needed is confined to the removal of dead and crossing branches and the thinning out of spindly wood to admit light and air into the tree canopy. Be careful not to prune off the extremities of too many branches because this is where most of the flowering shoots arise.
Though the medlar shares some pest problems common to its kin in the rose family, these pests rarely become serious enough to warrant concern or mention. No pests have called attention to themselves on my tree after almost two decades.
Propagation
Medlar is most commonly and most easily propagated by grafting. When I created my present medlar tree, I used a friend’s medlar for scion wood, but did not have a medlar rootstock. No matter; quoting eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips, "Men have gathered from the hawthorn’s branch, Large medlars imitating regal crowns." Medlar can be grafted upon rootstocks of pear, quince, hawthorn, juneberry, and, of course, medlar.
Medlars can also be propagated, with some difficulty, by other standard methods. The seeds need cool, moist stratification, but may not germinate until their second spring, especially if seed is not fresh when sown. And, of course, seedlings will bear fruit somewhat different from the parent tree. Softwood cuttings can be rooted but, as I said, with some difficulty.
Harvest and Use
Medlars are rock-hard and puckery when ready for harvest and must be allowed to soften before becoming edible. This softening is called “bletting,” a word coined in 1839 from the French word blessi, which denotes a particular type of bruised appearance found in fruits such as the medlar and the persimmon. Chemically speaking, bletting brings about an increase in sugars and a decrease in acids and tannins (tannins cause the unripe fruits to be puckery).
Though the fruit is picked rock-hard, it must be thoroughly matured on the tree before harvest. Fruit picked too early shrivels in storage and never attains good flavor. Medlars are ready for harvest when the leaves are just beginning to fall, at which stage the fruits part readily from the branch. Leaving fruits on the tree late in the season adds to the medlar’s show of beauty, for the nude branches become quite ornamental with their scores of little medlar pompoms.
Set each harvested fruit in a cool room calyx end down and not touching its neighbor on a clean shelf or a bed of straw, clean sand, or sawdust. Less fastidious gardeners might let ripe fruits blet on the tree or the ground.
Bletting requires from two weeks to a month, at which time the hard, cream-colored interior turns brown and mushy. Do not touch the fruits except to remove them for eating; they will show you they are fit to eat when their skins darken. Once bletted, medlars keep for several weeks.
The easiest way to eat a medlar is to suck the fruit empty, leaving skin and seeds behind. The fresh fruit is (was?) the classic accompaniment to port at the end of a meal. The pulp can be scooped out and folded into cream for a dessert dish. Medlars also have been eaten cooked in a number of ways, such as baked whole, stewed with butter, or roasted over a fire. The fruit is well suited to the usual array of jams, jellies, tarts, and syrups. You can make a refreshing drink by pouring boiling water over the fruit, then drinking the cooled liquid.
In the past, medlar wood was prized for its durability, and the fruits for their medicinal virtues. The wood was prescribed for spear points, cudgels, fighting clubs, walking sticks, and canes. In herbal remedies, the fruits were considered effective, according to the herbalist Culpeper, writing in the seventeenth century, to “strengthen the retentive faculty, therefore it stays Womens Longings: the good old Man cannot endure Womens Minds should run a gadding . . . very powerful to stay any Fluxes of Blood or Humours in Man or Woman . . . The Fruit eaten by Woman with Child, stayeth their Longing after unusual Meats.”
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Lee Reich devotes a chapter in his book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden
Posted by KGI on January 11, 2006 4:30 PM to Kitchen Gardeners International
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