pumpkinstrokemarrow

Yesterday we did not know this. Nevertheless, it did look like a grapefruit, between 2 and 3 times the size of a regular one. Took the management decision, which turned out to be the right one, to cut the thing in half across the equator. This revealed a large grapefruit like interior. Large enough that one could see the inner workings. Thick skin, yellow on the outside, white pith on the inside - the exo-pith. Void in the centre, but a void containing a central pillar of pith which produced the seeds, the largest of which were perhaps a centimetre in length. Central pillar of pith connected by plates of pith to the exo-pith, thus dividing the body of the thing into segments.

Which is where we get to the odd bit. The seeds clearly grew out of the pillar of pith, the various pith being the vascular system. The conduit of the grub for both the seeds proper and the growing pseudo-fruit (remembering from school biology that the seed is the fruit and the fleshy wrapping which we eat is properly known as a pseudo-fruit). But the flesh clearly grew out of the segmenting plates of pith, with the plates themselves growing out of the exo-pith. Each individual piece of flesh was a rounded cylinder, perhaps a quarter of an inch long and perhaps a bit less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Cylinders were packed, side by side, into sheets, the sheet of cylinders lying between two sheets of pith and growing, rather like bunches of grapes, out of one of them. The orientation was that the bunches of grapes were growing from the outside in. This was very clear when one peered closely into the central void - and this was the bit that Olympus could not manage - although just about visible (if you click to enlarge) along the top of the lower portion of fruit in the picture below.

The whole arrangement reminded one of the interior of a pomegranate - with the important differences that the individual bit of pomegranate is spherical rather than cylindrical and also contains the seed. Unlike the pomelo where the arrangements for the seeds and the pseudo-fruitlets have been segregated.

Potatoes also have a vascular system. They are not just an undifferentiated mass of white stuff. Careful boiling will reveal an irregular but intricate pith network threading through the interior. But not chewy pith like that of the grapefruit, which is just as well or the mashed potato which we all know and love would not exist.

Eventually we get around to eating the thing. And it was indeed recognisably a grapefruit. A bit drier - which may simply have been a matter of ripeness - and with a more interesting texture. Bit more work required to separate the fruit from the pith than with a regular grapefruit, but any small kitchen knife suffices. Rather fitter for this purpose than the more traditional grapefruit spoon.

Accompanied by a pert young Burgundy - a grand vin blanc from somewhere called Saint Vincent's Rock. Just the ticket. The only catch being that St. Vincent appears to be a Spanish rather than a French saint.

PS: suffering from an excess of clarity this morning. Far too many clear's and clearly's creeping into the text. And as my second boss - one Norman Davis - once pointed out, if a thing is so clear there is no need to say it. So I have tried to thin them out a bit.