Golden Globes

The crowd gathered well before the opening of the Alhambra farmers market, in a mood somewhere between festivity and riot. As Jerry Dimitman drove up in his truck loaded with gigantic pear-shaped pummelos, the all-Asian throng surged forward, arms outstretched, waving money, shouting, pleading, bouncing off one another as if in a mosh pit.

Amid this frenzy, Dimitman and his two sons heaved cartons, sold their precious yellow-gold fruit and tried to protect the smaller customers from getting trampled. After 25 minutes, only leaves remained, which several women reverently picked up and saved.

Each winter, in the weeks before Chinese New Year (which falls on Feb. 5 this year), a tumult ensues as Dimitman sells these unusual pummelos from his groves in Fallbrook and Covina. Why such commotion over what looks like an overgrown prehistoric grapefruit?

For many Asians, pummelos stir deep cultural resonances. The Alhambra crowd got excited because pear-shaped, white-fleshed pummelos, which are common in China, are rare in California, where the round, pink-fleshed Chandler variety predominates.

“People want the original Chinese pummelo,” explained a young Vietnamese man helping the Dimitmans. “It symbolizes good luck and plenty.”

The elephantine size of pummelos often draws stares from the uninitiated. Produce packers measure citrus by the number of fruits that fill a standard carton; grapefruits average in the 30s, typical pummelos range from 6 to 14, and 1s, basketball-size behemoths weighing more than 20 pounds, are not unknown.

Although pummelos vary widely in form, most have thick rinds, which can be green or yellow, depending on season and climate. Whether smooth or pebbly, they smell sweetly of orange blossoms and lemon peel, with a hint of gardenia.

Pummelos are less tender and juicy than grapefruits, but the best pummelos compare favorably with the best grapefruits. Most pummelo pulp tastes mildly sweet and is delightfully lacking in naringin, the chemical compound that makes grapefruit bitter.

Naringin abounds, however, in the spongy pith and tough membranes, which must be completely removed before the segments can be eaten. This is easier than it sounds, since the segments have a firm texture unique among citrus, with large juice sacs that hold together without bursting.

Pummelos play an important role as ritual offerings in modern Chinese folk religion and are considered to have magical properties. The southern Chinese word for pummelo, “yu,” means “we have,” said Clair Lin, the information officer at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights. “It’s a very profound meaning, relating to health, money and luck.” Since pummelos are large and golden yellow, they evoke gold--lots of it.

Pummelo leaves symbolize purity and are soaked in water to make a ceremonial bath to ritually cleanse a person and repel evil. Many Chinese weddings include immersion in pummelo water, and newborn babies are often bathed in the auspicious liquid.

In some areas, such as Taiwan, pummelos ripen in August and September. There Chinese families place pummelos on their household altars for the Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival, which usually falls in September or early October. “Yu” also sounds like Chinese words for protection and blessing, so pummelos, which can look rather moonlike, express the hope for the moon god’s benevolence and serve as a symbol of family unity.

In most of China, pummelos mature in December and January, and they star most prominently in Chinese New Year’s celebrations.

For last year’s festivities, James Lee, a wholesale produce dealer, served a buffet banquet at his home in Hacienda Heights that included sea cucumber, Hawaiian ham, grilled salmon and stir-fried greens.

Red-orange paper diamonds with the Chinese characters for “Good Luck” festooned the walls, as well as the giant pear-shaped pummelo that graced the household shrine. For more good luck, Lee handed guests envelopes containing crisp new money along with Oroblancos, modern pummelo-grapefruit crosses, from a tree in his backyard.

Chinese miners and laborers brought pummelos to California during the Gold Rush, and an Angeleno named Manuel Requena grew them in 1858. But these were seedlings, and since pummelos, unlike most citrus, do not bear true like parent trees if propagated from seed, the fruits were mostly dry, bitter and seedy. “They are matters of wonder and that is all,” noted a citrus treatise in 1885.

George Toy, 94, lives in a house shaded by 11 pummelo trees amid the last remnants of Bakersfield’s old Chinatown, once the third largest in California. Standing next to a 40-foot tree planted by his mother in 1928, he clutched a large pear-shaped fruit and recalled how pummelos served as a link to the homeland for his family:

“My father arrived in San Francisco from southern China in 1875, when he was 10 years old. When I was a boy, we had a store just for Chinese people, who worked on farms and ranches, and as cooks and laundrymen. Everybody hated the Chinese; they’d catch me and beat me up. We used to get pummelos sent over by boat from China, for New Year’s decorations.”

Today, California produces more than 90% of the nation’s pummelo crop (Florida grows the rest), but this could never have happened without the help of citrus breeders who adapted the fruit to California conditions.

The problem was not just that early seedlings bore mostly inferior fruit; even after the best grafted Asian varieties arrived here in the first third of the 20th century, pummelos proved very specific in their climatic requirements. Without tropical heat and humidity, most didn’t develop acceptable flavor until March or April, far too late for the Chinese New Year’s market.

Pummelos might have languished indefinitely, but the same feature that doomed seedlings to unpalatability--rampant cross-fertilization, resulting in offspring of variable quality--provided perfect material for breeders’ experiments.

The breakthrough came when professors James Cameron and Robert Soost of UC Riverside found that a Thai pummelo, the Siamese Sweet, imparted low acidity to its progeny. In 1961 they introduced the Chandler variety, a round pummelo with sweet, crisp pink flesh, which ripens by November in the Central Valley. Moreover, when grown in large blocks, it sets fruits with few or no seeds.

As Asian immigration to the United States increased in the 1960s and ‘70s, growers found that pummelos brought high prices. They planted small groves, mostly in Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley. In the last decade, cultivation has quadrupled to more than 500 acres.

In 1980 Cameron and Soost released the Oroblanco, a pummelo-grapefruit hybrid with wonderfully sweet, juicy, light-yellow pulp, which tastes like a grapefruit without the tartness; a similar cross, the Melogold, larger and more like a pummelo, followed in 1986 but didn’t catch on as the Oroblanco did.

The UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection includes some 50-odd pummelos gathered from around the world and rows of promising new crosses. On a chilly late December morning, Ottillia Bier, who helps supervise the collection, walked with citrus knife in hand, seeking to sample the sweetest slices, from the lower part of fruit on the south sides of the trees.

“Tasting some of these pummelos fogs your mind, they’re so sour and bitter,” she said, with bemused resignation. But others--such as the Sarawak, a thin-rinded fruit with tender greenish flesh and an intense, well-balanced lime taste--reveal complex, interesting flavors.

Then there’s the Cocktail grapefruit, an experimental pummelo-mandarin cross so sweet and juicy that it “escaped” from the collection when someone filched a piece of budwood. Though it’s mostly available at farmers markets, several commercial growers in the Central Valley have put in blocks.

No one knows pummelos better than Bier’s former professor at Cal Poly Pomona, Jerry Dimitman, who grows 18 acres of unusual varieties.

On a sunny January afternoon, he showed a visitor around his Fallbrook grove. Now 79 and retired, he speaks in a hoarse whisper.

“I started collecting pummelos in the Philippines in 1944 as a commander in the Navy during World War II,” he said. “Now I’ve got 30 varieties, down from 37. I experiment with them, take measurements and then cut them down and try others.”

A few other growers raise white-fleshed, pear-shaped pummelos, but their fruits are dry and waxy. Through years of searching Asia, Dimitman has found varieties that not only look right but taste good, such as the big Chongs and Wongs, named after Chinese friends of his, that drove the crowd wild at Alhambra.

He also has the Sutter, an extraordinarily juicy, delicate and flavorful pummelo brought to California by Chinese coolies working on the railroads in the 1860s.

Many fruit collectors would like to take cuttings of his trees, but Dimitman, who affects an ornery eccentricity, won’t let any wood out of his grasp.

“No one gets it!,” he rasped, before letting on, in his next breath, that his son Robert would inherit the rare pummelos, which will eventually go to UC Riverside.

On one side of the road, exquisitely ripe Sarawaks plopped off the trees and tumbled down the steep slope.

“Those trees are ready for the power saw,” said Dimitman. “Sarawaks are so delicious, but nobody knows about them, so I can’t sell them.”

He only brings his pummelos to only a few Asian-American produce sellers and to the Alhambra farmers market, in the month before Chinese New Year.

Other growers have to make a living. Though pummelos are still primarily an ethnic and specialty item, they are increasingly available at mainstream supermarkets.

“Once, it was the kiss of death to try to sell pummelos after Chinese New Year, but a broader demand has developed,” said Mark Johnson, who markets specialty citrus for Sunkist, which handles 85% of the nation’s pummelo crop.

Recently, as pummelo supplies increased and prices dropped, farmers have cut back on new plantings. Oroblanco growers, however, face disaster. They put in several thousand acres, aiming to export most of the crop to Japan. But Israeli growers pirated the variety, calling their version the Sweetie, and flooded the Japanese market with earlier-maturing fruit.

To make life yet more difficult, last season a devastating freeze the week before Christmas blasted Central Valley citrus groves. Pummelos love temperatures around freezing, which turn the rinds bright yellow; they can tolerate the upper 20s; but after prolonged periods below 27, they burst their juice sacs and dry out, ruined.

Just before midnight on one of the coldest days, Harrison Smith--who has grown pummelos in Porterville since 1974--sent his two teenage grandsons to light the orchard heaters.

Then Smith turned on 11 wind machines, mounted on towers around the 175-acre property, to circulate the warmer inversion layer of air just above the treetops.

Like many farmers, Smith lost his navel orange crop that week, but he escaped with minimal damage to the pummelos, which were somewhat protected by their thick rinds. This year’s harvest looks to be first-rate.

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The Grapefruit’s Grandfather

The pummelo (pronounced puh-mellow) is Citrus maxima, one of the three original species of citrus, along with the citron (C. medica) and the mandarin (C. reticulata). All other citrus fruits, including oranges, lemons and limes, arose from them as hybrids and mutations.

The pummelo has grown wild in China for thousands of years. A Confucian text relates that the Emperor Yu received a bundle of the fruit as tribute around 2200 BC.

In the mid-17th century, an English sea captain (only recently verified as a historical figure, Phillip Chaddock) brought pummelo seeds from the East Indies to Barbados, where settlers started growing the fruits. Blurring the captain’s name, they called them shaddocks.

In the next 100 years, these shaddocks hybridized with sweet oranges to produce the ancestors of the modern grapefruit. All modern grapefruit--so called either because they hang in bunches like grapes or supposedly taste like grapes--derive from a single example brought to Florida in the early 19th century.

Many early growers considered grapefruit to be a form of shaddock. Confusion between the two persisted into the late 19th century, when agricultural authorities tried unsuccessfully to replace the ludicrous word “grapefruit” with “pomelo,” derived from the Dutch pompelmoes, meaning “big lemon.” Because “pomelo” is still sometimes used as a synonym for grapefruit, “pummelo” is now the preferred spelling for the original fruit.

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Where to Get Pummelos

* Cal Poly University Farm Store. Chandler, Chinese pear-shaped and experimental pummelos from Pomona. Citrus Lane, Pomona, Mondays through Fridays, 1 to 5:30 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; (909) 869-2058. Also at West Covina farmers market (200 S. Glendora Ave.), Saturdays 7:30 a.m. to noon.

* Cottage Grove. Chandler pummelos and Melogolds from Ivanhoe. At San Dimas farmers market (West Bonita Avenue between Monte Vista and San Dimas avenues), Wednesdays 4 to 7 p.m.; Montrose (2400 Honolulu Ave.), Thursdays 4 to 7 p.m.; Long Beach Northeast (Wardlow Road and Norwalk Boulevard), Saturdays 7:30 to 11:30 a.m.

* Crown 12 Ranch. Chandler pummelos and Oroblancos from Corona. At Redondo Beach farmers market (Harbor Drive south of Redondo Beach Pier), Thursdays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.; El Segundo (Main Street between Grand and Holly avenues), Thursdays 3 to 7 p.m.; West Hollywood (7377 Santa Monica Blvd.), Mondays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

* Hawaii Supermarket. Chinese pear-shaped and Chandler pummelos from the Central Valley. 120 E. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel; 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; (626) 307-0062.

* Jerry Dimitman. Unusual pummelos including Sarawak, Sutter and Wong varieties, from Covina and Fallbrook. Through Chinese New Year (Feb. 5) at Alhambra farmers market (East Bay State and Monterey streets), Sundays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

* Garcia Organic Farm. Organic Chandler pummelos, Cocktail grapefruit and Oroblancos from Fallbrook. At Santa Monica farmers markets (Arizona Avenue and 2nd Street), Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturdays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Santa Monica (2640 Main St.), Sundays 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

* Kirksey Farms. Chandler pummelos, Melogolds and Oroblancos from Exeter. At Fullerton farmers market (450 W. Orangethorpe Ave.), Wednesdays 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Burbank (Orange Grove Avenue and Byrd Street), Saturdays 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; Alhambra (East Bay State and Monterey streets), Sundays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Torrance (2200 Crenshaw Blvd.), Tuesdays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

* Mud Creek Ranch. Chandler and Reinking pummelos, African shaddocks, Melogolds and Oroblancos from Santa Paula. At Camarillo farmers market (2220 Ventura Blvd.), Saturdays 8:30 a.m. to noon; Ojai (300 E. Matilija St.), Sundays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

* Polito Family Farms. Melogolds and Oroblancos from Valley Center and Pauma Valley, San Diego County. At Santa Monica farmers market (Arizona Avenue and 2nd Street), Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Northridge (Tampa Avenue south of Plummer Street), Wednesdays 4 to 7 p.m.; Westwood (Weyburn Avenue at Westwood Boulevard), Thursdays 2 to 7 p.m.; Venice (Venice Boulevard at Venice Way), Fridays 7 to 11 a.m.; Corona del Mar (Pacific Coast Highway at Marguerite Avenue), Saturdays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

* Thys Ranch. Organic Chandler pummelos from Rainbow. At Torrance farmers markets (2200 Crenshaw Blvd.), Tuesdays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturdays 8 a.m. to noon.

* Walker Farm. Chandler pummelos, Melogolds and Oroblancos from Exeter. At Glendale farmers market (Brand Boulevard between Broadway and Wilson Avenue), Thursdays 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Long Beach Downtown (Promenade North between Byrd Street and Broadway), Fridays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Pasadena Victory Park (2800 N. Sierra Madre Blvd.), Saturdays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Alhambra (East Bay State and Monterey streets), Sundays 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.