Nathalie Wood, age 11, of Hawarden, Tows, for her question:
What is a pomegranate?
Like the orange and the apple, the pomegranate has a long and glamorous history. This handsome tropical fruit fired the imagination of early man. It is mentioned many times in the Bible and we are told that stone pomegranates were carved on the wonderful temple of Solomon. In the ancient Odyssey, we are told that Odybsius found pomegranates growing in the fairy garden of the mythical king.
The ancient Greeks wove a story of the seasons around the pomegranate. Persephone, daughter of the earth goddess., was captured by Pluto, king of tha 1undorworld. She was told she must eat nothing during her stay underground. But she was tempted and' ate the juicy pulp around one tiny pomegranate seed. For this, she was condemned to spend six months of every year in Pluto's underground kingdom. To the Greeks, this myth explained how seeds return to the earth and come forth again with Persephone each spring.
We may wonder why the pomegranate played such a glamorous role all these thousands of years ago. The reason is that the fat peaches and plums, the juicy apples and grapefruit which we enjoy today had not yet been developed, It took countless generations of careful cultivation to bring these delicious fruits to perfection. The apples of ancient days would seem hard and sour to our pampered tastes and the oranges were not much better than our wild varieties. Compared with what they had in those days, the pomegranate was a glamorous fruit indeed.
Nowadays, we may think that the handsome fruit is mostly seeds. Somewhat larger than an apple, it has ;a pale, leathery skin. The inside is filled with sizeably dark seeds, set in a globe of pulpypink jelly.
We eat it by separating the seeds from the pink pulp.
The taste of pomegranate is sweet, arid very refreshing. Nowadays we can enjoy the delicious flavor without wresting with the seeds, The pulp and juicer are squeezed out by machinery and used to flavor summer drinks, The skin is used to make an astringent for medical purposes. It also yields tannin for preparing leather.
The pomegranate plant loves warm dry weather. Its original home was India and Africa, where it still grows wild. It does well in some of our southern states, where it is cultivated. The cultivated plant is a small tree some 20 feet tall. It has long glossy green leaves and huge scarlet flowers.
The pomegranate is the only member of the plant family Punicaceae a name which dates back to ancient Rome: Tie Romans, who loved good food, imported their pomegranates from Carthage in North Africa.