Alhambra farmers market: pummelos for Chinese New Year

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The scores of customers who join the long line at the Alhambra farmers market on Sunday mornings to buy Jerry Dimitman’s Wong pummelos all know the drill: Get there early, and be prepared to wait as each shopper scrutinizes the giant pear-shaped citrus fruits, holding them in the hand, one by one, to judge their weight, looking for heavy, shapely specimens. Plenty of pummelos are grown in California, but most are the flat, pink-fleshed Chandler variety. And especially as Chinese New Year approaches -- it will be Sunday, Feb. 14, this year, the Year of the Tiger -- many Chinese Americans seek out the necked, yellow-fleshed fruits they remember from their homeland. Asians give them as offerings at temple altars, where their gold color symbolizes prosperity; they also peel and eat them, carefully removing the tough, bitter membrane from each section.

Native, like most citrus, to southern China and southeastern Asia, the pummelo (sometimes spelled ‘pomelo’) is the mother of the grapefruit, and one of the three primary species of cultivated citrus, from which other types developed by hybridization and mutation. Compared with a grapefruit it is larger and has a much thicker rind and somewhat drier, milder pulp.

Dimitman, a retired professor of plant pathology at Cal Poly Pomona, named his most successful pummelo variety Wong, after a friend, the late Ben Wong, who owned a restaurant in Alhambra and brought in budwood of the variety from China in the 1940s. (Today such importations are more strictly controlled, and smuggling threatens to devastate California’s citrus industry by introducing new pests and diseases.) Read more at David Karp’s weekly Market Watch report: