Some interesting facts about one of the world’s oldest cultivated fruits. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
Pomegranates have earned a reputation as a nutritional powerhouse, but they aren’t exactly the easiest fruits to seed or prepare. We will get into that later in the next couple of programs.
Pomegranates are one of the world’s oldest cultivated fruits. Thought to have originated in Persia, they were taken to the Mediterranean, Africa, Afghanistan, and China, gaining in popularity along the way. Introduced by Spanish missionaries to California in the 17-hundreds, they now produce 90 percent of pomegranates in the United States.
Pomegranate is medieval Latin, meaning apple of many grains. Speaking of grains, those little juicy pieces inside the fruit are known as arils. Each aril has a seed inside. That dry, off-white bit inside the fruit that holds the arils is known as the membrane.
Different varieties of pomegranates may have smaller or thicker membranes, and the arils may be big and juicy with a tiny seed, or they might be small with a large seed.
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