Whither the Pummelo?

Another exciting food story! A few days ago I bought a pummelo at the store. It was only 99 cents and it was huge. I had no idea what it was, but it was in the same aisle as the grapefruits so I figured it was like a big, delicious grapefruit.

It also intrigued Jack. For the next 4 days every time we would walk by the table we would pick up the pummelo and talk about it.

“What’s this again?”
“A pummelo.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. It was in the grapefruit aisle. Isn’t it huge?”
Next day…picking up pummelo and looking at it.

“Mmmm, we should eat this one of these days.”
“I know. I hope it is delicious!”

This sort of nonsense went on until one night we picked it up and decided to eat it.

“What is this again?”
“A pummelo. Isn’t it huge?”
“Yea, but feel it. It is so lightweight.”
“Oh my gosh! You are right. It hardly weighs anything. If it is like a big, delicious grapefruit then it’s all dried out and yucky.”
“Yea, it would have to be all dried out. There can’t be any juice in this thing.”
“How can it be so big and so lightweight?”
“Should we eat it?”
“Yea – let’s do it.”

So we decided to peel it in case the “lo” part of the name indicated it was like an orange. Once we got in there we discovered why it was so lightweight. It had about 4 inches of peel on it. We peeled off tons of this thick peel, and the resulting fruit thing was about the size of an orange (and not a big one, just a normal one.) We went from cantaloupe-sized fruit to orange-sized fruit. Then it turned out that the outer membrane holding the segments together was very, very tough and thick as well. We struggled to peel apart the segments, busted into the actual fruit area and ate it.

It was not like a big, delicious grapefruit or even a grapefruit/orange cross. It was like a weird, non-juicy, non-tart grapefruit gone wrong. It wasn’t bad and it wasn’t delicious. It was just OK. And for all that work and all that excess peel it just didn’t seem worth it. It was way more fun to look at it and speculate about it than to actually eat it.

“Lo, the pummelo will not be gracing our fruit dish at this time.