Geode with Ruby Gems
Mysterious on the outside – magical on the inside. I love this fruit (Ingredient Special on Pomegranates).
The first time I saw this fruit, I despised it. There was no way I was going to eat that. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll tell you the story from the beginning.
It was on my first trip to the California desert. I was visiting the area with some friends and we had local host families. Mine was a trio of three wonderful ladies: grandmother, mother, and daughter. And we lived way out in the desert, which meant we had to drive about half an hour to get anywhere – including the closest neighbor. Of course, I was used to driving that distance to visit friends when I was a kid. But there were usually a few houses in between.
The days were quite warm – not scorching hot, as it was already fall. The nights were cool, but not too cold. But the night sky was absolutely spectacular: I had never before experienced the Milky Way drooping down to the horizon. Wow!
The house was part of a small farm established a few generations ago by the daughter’s great-grandfather. He also planted most of the trees. Which was good, because for dinner we had fresh olives from the garden. I tried them, even though I was not a big olive eater, and it completely changed my attitude towards olives.
Then my hosts gave me a round, shriveled ball. It looked dead and even a little moldy to me, so I tried to find a polite excuse not to eat it. But they insisted. They peeled the fruit for me and gave me the red cores inside. And that was it. Yay! I have loved pomegranates ever since.
When I moved to Berlin, pomegranates became a fruit that was almost always available in grocery stores. This is because the cuisines of the cultures from which the fruit originated – Southern Europe, the Orient, and Northern Africa – are part of the local metropolitan mix. You’ll find pomegranate sauce on many menus in the city.
Not only is the fruit very healthy – both the juice and the crunchy red interior – but it also grows on an extraordinary tree. It can adapt to many different types of soil – some varieties even tolerate a little salt in the mix. Also, some varieties of the tree – given good living conditions and a friendly seasonal order – can withstand an amazing range of temperatures, from quite cold (a few degrees below freezing) to quite hot (around 40°C). This is probably the reason why both the fruit and the tree were highly valued and symbolized various aspects of life in ancient cultures such as Persia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Documentation of this goes back as far as 4000 years.
Pomegranate fruit can be stored almost as long as apples – practically all year round, given the right conditions. But the pomegranate tree can even outlive its regular apple ‘siblings’ by up to 100 years (the most common meaning of “pomme” is “apple” in French, although the fruits are not related).
Knowing this, I look carefully at these remarkable fruits whenever I buy one – which, as I mentioned, is quite often. But the thing that really gets me every time is the moment when you break open the weathered, leathery sphere and there are these bright and dark red geometric shapes inside, arranged like precious crystals in a geode. Simply beautiful.
Side Notes
- There is a recipe that accompanies this ingredient special: [‘Desert Views’].