Summertime sweetness: How watermelons surprise and delight us

A Times of India (ToI) article in June 1937 describes a river in the Deccan summer diminished to a trickle. But on both sides flowed rivers of green vines “in which you seem to see a number of bald-headed men swimming. These are the watermelons”.

This vivid image sums up the summer magic of watermelons. Just when the heat is worst, watermelons appear as the seasonal solution. As that article describes, they thrive in the places most scorched by the sun, which goes back to their origins in the deserts of Africa, though exactly where is debated. It was long thought to be the Kalahari desert or Nigeria, which grows similar seeming egusi melons for their oil-rich seeds.

But the agroscientist Harry S.Paris has combined DNA testing, archaeological evidence like Egyptian tomb paintings and words used in Hebrew texts, like the Israelites under Moses remembering the watermelons of Egypt, to argue convincingly for an origin in northeastern Africa. Travellers in the desert found the fruits, while tasteless, stored a safe source of water. And then over centuries, it was bred to its current, crisp sweetness.

Egyptian watermelons were certainly famous. In 1886, ToI reported on the Bombay Natural History Society’s fruit show where a “Mr. Phipson exhibited two gigantic Egyptian watermelons, each of them being as much as a man could conveniently carry”. And Egypt’s central position, between Africa, Europe and Asia, was ideal for spreading watermelons across the world – to the USA, for example, where the slaves appreciated their thirst quenching properties while toiling on plantations.

“They are the villagers icecream sherbet, cheap and plentiful, sweet and cool and satisfying to the taste,” ToI wrote in 1937 and yet, unlike other fruits cheap and abundant enough for the poor, the well-off did not disdain watermelons. Summer heat is an equaliser or perhaps we just have a visceral response to that contrast of redpink flesh against green skin (yellow fleshed watermelons, said to be among the sweetest, haven’t become popular in India yet).

Nearly all this consumption is of the raw fruit, or uncooked juices, sorbets or slushes, like the amazing Iranian version, with sabja seeds, served at Shiraz Art Café in Chennai. Some now use it in cakes, like Black Star Pastry in Australia, whose cake made of a watermelon layer sandwiched between layers of almond meringue and rose cream has become a cult favourite, particularly in China (which grows by far more watermelons than anywhere else in the world).

Another recent cult culinary practice has been to actually cook watermelons by roasting or smoking them, and so strong is our familiarity with the fresh fruit that this seemed unlikely to result in anything good. Yet in Goa, Simona Rossi at the Italian restaurant Ciao Bella has perfected this as a vegan version of carpaccio, the raw meat dish. The smoked, compressed watermelon looks startlingly like real meat and tastes extraordinarily good. It shows how this most ancient of summer fruits still retains an ability to surprise and delight us.