I Love Pomegranates
Have you ever eaten a pomegranate? They are one of those intoxicatingly exotic fruits that, as a child, I wondered if they really existed. They were, after all, the fruit that Persephone ate after she had been abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. The act of eating the pomegranate meant that she was forever tied to her captor and his home, in the world of the dead, forever. In a moment of conscious choice, so the story goes, Hades offered Persephone a blood red pomegranate as she was about to leave the Underworld, and she willingly accepted it and ate six seeds — tying her fate forever to a life half lived in the world of the dead with her captor / lover, Hades.
When I was in seventh grade we had a whole subject called ‘Ancient Greek’. It seemed a little absurd at the time that we would spend so much time learning about an ancient culture and place that was so far away that I couldn’t even imagine it. This was the 80s, don’t forget, and my knowledge of the world was limited to BBC TV shows (The Goodies, The Two Ronnies), some US sitcoms (Happy Days, Here’s Lucy, I Dream of Genie, and the likes), and what the Britannica World Book Encyclopedia told me. It was in this class that I learned the story of Persephone and Hades, and was introduced to the pomegranate.
In those days, the internet hadn’t been thought of yet, and the closest I got to experiencing anything remotely ‘exotic’ was through our annual dinner out at the Bateman’s Bay RSL, which sported the best example of an Australian country town Chinese restaurant. As an aside, anyone growing up in Australia in the 70s and 80s knows that every country town boasted (and I am pretty sure still does) one Chinese restaurant. A legacy from our gold rush days, no doubt, with Australian-ised Cantonese dishes such as Lemon Chicken (my favourite as a kid), Sweet and Sour Pork (one of my sister’s favourites), Beef in Black Bean Sauce, Prawn Toast and Spring Rolls. The fanciest dish of all, and one I would wait all year to eat (yes, this truly was a once a year occasion) — fried ice cream. To a young five year old country bumpkin, at the tail end of the 70s, let me tell you, ice cream dipped in batter and deep fried was about as ‘exotic’ as you could get.
I digress. My point is that a pomegranate was a magical, mystical fruit that I had heard of in a Greek myth, and which may or may not have existed in reality, but for me (as yet) there was no actual proof. All I knew is that it was something that, having been willfully eaten, somehow allowed a living person to spend half the year living in the land of the dead.
Fast forward more than three decades and today, I can say with confidence, I love pomegranates. Although my obsession has really come about quite suddenly, during this latest lockdown, pomegranates have been sneaking up on me for some time now. They started with Persephone in Grade 7, and then no sign of them (that I can recall) until I was travelling in China in 1999. My husband and I, young twenty-somethings, were backpacking through South East Asia, the usual right of passage for young Aussies who want to see the world. We’d travelled through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia & Vietnam, and had crossed the border in northern Vietnam and jumped on a train to Kunming. We were also travelling with our friend, Phil, and were joined in China by another friend, Cindy. Seventeen hours on a hard seat train from the Vietnamese/Chinese border to Kunming, when smoking anywhere was acceptable. Resilience building.
We had planned on travelling up to the Three Gorges, which I was fascinated by and which I wanted to see before the huge dam project that was going to flood most of it. On reading a book by Simon Winchester, The River At the Centre of the World (something I had picked up on our travels), I was turned off by Simon’s descriptions of the mass tourism and seemingly rubbish strewn section of the Yangtze that was the Three Gorges, and we decided instead to go further into the mountains, to Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is at the early beginnings of the Yangtze River, and is named as such because this particular section of the river is so narrow that it is said that a tiger could leap from one side to the other. I’m not sure if that is entirely true, but it definitely is a narrow stretch of the river, and stunningly beautiful.
Pomegranates. No, we didn’t find them at Tiger Leaping Gorge, but further north. After completing the trek we were recovering in Old Town Lijiang, which is the jump off point for tourists in the region. Sitting in a cafe, we were discussing where we should go next, when a guy approached us. He was from a newly opened up tourist area, Zhongdian. Would we be interested in visiting? He had a beautifully drawn map, highlighting the region. Zhongdian was known then as the ‘Zhongdian Autonomous Prefecture’ and had actually been part of Tibet many years before. After Mao’s long march, Zhongdian was annexed and subsequently closed to everyone — Chinese and foreigners alike — and had been closed off from the rest of the world for decades. It was only in 1997 or so that the area had been opened up to local tourism, and now, in 1999 it was being opened up to foreigners as well. At the time, people said it was more Tibetan than Tibet, with monasteries still there (we ended up meeting the 13th Lama in a hilltop monastery), and traditional customs still intact.
Well, that sounded like a great adventure, and we decided to go. After a very hairy bus ride (half the road had disappeared down the mountain in sections), we arrived in Zhongdian. It felt like we were the first white people to ever visit. Having travelled in other remote areas of China, it often feels like that — people stare at you as it you are an alien, which I guess in some ways you are.
Zhongdian, or Shangrila as it is now known, is a remote area at the foothills of a mountain range that runs parallel to the Himalayas. We were greeted with stunning vistas of farmlands, resplendent with colourful Tibetan houses dotting the landscape. After settling into our hotel, we wandered into town. After discovering that the bank did not accept travellers cheques or foreign cards, we were that remote and locals hadn’t heard about foreign tourism, we found ourselves wandering the local market. It was there that I saw my first pomegranate. My husband exclaimed with delight that this was a pomegranate and we should buy some, they were incredible. I was still trying to understand how he knew this fruit was a pomegranate when he handed me some seeds. I bit into them and felt the flavour explode in my mouth. It was sweet and tart at the same time, and surprisingly juicy. But each seed had small seeds inside, and my mouth was soon full of these small seeds, which I proceeded to spit out. There was a guy with an old fashioned juice press making pomegranate juice. We bought some, and I cried in delight as the liquid of the gods ran down my throat and filled my senses. Delicious.
It was a long time between drinks. I recall having pomegranates in salads, sometimes, at posh restaurants in London, Sydney, New York. Places where pomegranate and toasted pine nuts adorn a salad, and where a feta, watermelon and mint salad is not out of place. Delicious yet slightly wanky. But never a pomegranate juice, and I never bought them myself at the supermarket. Pomegranates just weren’t a thing in my life. I had a brief rekindling of my relationship with pomegranates on another trip to China, this time in 2011, with kids in tow. We were visiting my brother, who lived in Beijing. We had five weeks and no real plan, except to see the pandas in Chengdu, when my brother showed me photos of a recent visit he had made to Kashgar. We booked flights the next day and found ourselves in Kashgar, again wandering exotic and foreign-feeling markets. Pomegranate juice stalls were everywhere. “Oh, I remember this,” I recalled to the kids.”‘We drank pomegranate juice when we visited China in the 1990s.” We bought some, and again — delicious. Exotic. Sweet and tart at the same time. And the absolute right colour for a food that you know is going to taste amazing AND be good for you at the same time. We even bought a floor rug in Kashgar for our bedroom, hand woven with the Kashgar symbol of, yes, you guessed it, the pomegranate. I have a rug now, in my bedroom, covered in pomegranates. I must have known that there was more to this fruit than a couple of chance encounters in Chinese marketplaces.
It wasn’t until I moved to Mumbai two and a half years ago that my love affair with pomegranates really began. Suddenly, they were everywhere. A fruit that I had once thought may be mystical, and, once having discovered they actually are real, that I had tried only on a couple of occasions on holiday were suddenly at every fruit stall on every street corner, winking at me, inviting me to buy them, try them, fall in love with them. I think the first time I bought one the fruit seller upsold me — and believe me, Indians are the absolute best at selling you things you don’t realise you want and often what you definitely don’t need. ‘Try the pomegranates, very good.’ ‘Hmmm… not sure.’ ‘Only 180 rupees for one kilo, very good.’ ‘I’ll take one.’ ‘One kilo?’ ‘No, one pomegranate.’ I ended up with a kilo of course.
I had no idea how to open the pomegranate when I got home. Their skins are very thick, so you can’t really peel them with your fingernails, like an orange. You need a sharp knife. But how to cut them so you don’t damage the fruit inside? Pomegranates are made up of hundreds of tiny fruit sacs that grow around an even tinier seed. So how to get the seeds out without bursting the fruit sacs? The first time I tried I just cut the pomegranate in quarters, breaking some of the fruit sacs in half and finding the chopping board covered in juice (which is still, by the way, the fastest way to enjoy a pomegranate, but possibly one of the more messy).When I finally opened that first pomegranate and liberated the seeds from the core and into my mouth, well, it was a wow moment. Juicy. Flavoursome. Heaven. If I was Persephone I would have eaten more than just six seeds. After that experience, I would buy pomegranates every now and again. They grew on me. But I still spat out the seeds, every time.
Roll forward to today. I am truly, madly, deeply in love. I find myself eating pomegranates every day. I actually think I have eaten pomegranates every day for at least 50 days, perhaps more. I no longer spit out the seeds — they are part of the experience, and I swallow them all. I buy them by the kilo, sometimes two kilos. Up until a few weeks ago, I still used to cut them into quarters, pop them in a bowl, and sit and eat them, seed by seed, in front of the TV. I cut up two when I’m sharing. One for the family, one for me. My youngest likes the juice. I love the fruit.
As fate would have it, my love affair is only going from strength to strength. A friend sent me a ‘life hack’ a couple of weeks ago. A special way to cut pomegranates. Cut a square in the top and peel it off. Slice down the pomegranate six ways, where the white meets the skin. Pull it apart, and hey presto — it’s like having an orange. You can stick it in your mouth and suck out the seeds, in one seamless and delicious motion. No seeds damaged. Heaven. On. Earth.
