Orange

The orange is the fruit of the orange tree, a citrus native to a region spanning southern China, northeast India and Myanmar. It is one of the most widely grown fruits in the world, eaten mostly fresh or as juice, while its peel supplies aromatic oils for cooking, perfumery and cleaning products.

History

The sweet orange is not a wild plant. It arose under domestication in that Asian region, most likely from a cross between a mandarin and a pomelo. Every sweet orange variety descends from that original cross, and the differences among them come from mutations that growers selected as they propagated trees. The bitter orange, which was the only kind known in Europe for centuries, has a separate origin. The earliest written reference to the sweet orange appears in Chinese literature and is dated to 314 BC.

The Moors introduced the bitter orange to al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula, where large-scale cultivation began in the 10th century. The sweet orange remained unknown in the Mediterranean until the late 15th or early 16th century, when Italian and Portuguese merchants brought trees into the region. It quickly became a luxury food, grown in private glasshouses called orangeries. By 1646 it was well known across Europe, and it went on to become the most widely cultivated fruit tree on the continent. Louis XIV of France had a great love of orange trees and built the grandest royal orangery at Versailles, where potted trees in silver tubs decorated the palace rooms and the glasshouse supplied the court all year round.

Spanish travellers carried the sweet orange to the Americas. Christopher Columbus may have planted it on Hispaniola during his second voyage in 1493, though this remains a possibility rather than a documented fact. Later expeditions brought it to South America, to Mexico and, in 1565, to Florida. Spanish missionaries introduced trees to Arizona, and Franciscans planted them in San Diego in 1769. In California, citrus growing expanded through the 19th century. The navel variety, distributed from Brazil in 1873, became the backbone of the industry, and railways and ventilated boxcars opened national markets. Today Brazil is the largest producer, followed by China and Mexico.

Culture

Oranges are usually grouped into four classes. Common or white oranges make up about two-thirds of world production and go mostly into juice. Blood oranges have red flesh, coloured by pigments that need cool nights to develop, and are widely grown around the Mediterranean. Navel oranges carry a small secondary fruit at the apex that looks like a navel; their thick skin peels easily, and they are mainly eaten fresh. Acidless oranges, called sweet oranges in the United States and dulce, sucrena or maltese elsewhere, are especially popular in North Africa, the Near East and Egypt, though they keep poorly for export.

In the kitchen, oranges are peeled and eaten raw as a dessert, and their juice is a commodity traded on the Intercontinental Exchange. In Britain, bitter Seville oranges are the basis of marmalade, and almost the whole Spanish crop of these fruit is exported there for that purpose. The first published recipe dates from 1714. Zest is used in desserts and cocktails, and sweet orange oil, made largely of D-limonene, is pressed from the peel as a by-product of juice production. It flavours food and drink, scents perfumes and aromatherapy products, and also appears in household cleaners.

Names reflect the fruit's history. In Spanish, the sweet orange was first called «naranja de China» before taking the plain name, while the old bitter orange became «naranja amarga». In parts of Mexico and the Caribbean it is still called «naranja china», and in Puerto Rico and some Dominican cities simply «china». The English word came through Old French, and the colour was named after the fruit, with the first recorded use in English dating from 1512.

Oranges appear in art across many centuries. The Song dynasty fan painting Yellow Oranges and Green Tangerines by Zhao Lingrang, from around 1070 to 1100, shows the fruit in China long before it reached Western painting. The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, from 1434, includes one of the first oranges in Western art, and Botticelli set his Primavera in an orange grove. Scholars note that oranges could signify desire and wealth, but also deformity, and that Sicilian fairy tales give them magical powers. Vincent van Gogh painted oranges in 1889 and 1890, and Henri Matisse's last painting, Nude with Oranges, dates from 1951.

Trivia