With the arrival of the hot summer, watermelon is a well-deserved "artifact" for cooling off. However, many post-00s today almost do not know such a watermelon, because it faded out of people's vision at the end of the last century and withdrew from the fruit market, which is the black-skinned watermelon that was once known as the king of fruits.
I don't know if the post-90s have ever seen a TV series, the story tells that people in a village rush to plant watermelons, and every year to hold a watermelon competition, those who get the title of "melon king" will get rich rewards and financial support. The hero is a young boy who and his grandfather eventually lost to another villager because the melons grown by the villagers were sweeter and more refreshing. Later, the villager returned the title of "Melon King" to his grandfather and the little boy, because he admitted that his watermelon had secretly added sugar. The play is called The Legend of the Melon King. The watermelon in the play is so big that it weighs fifty pounds, and the audience marvels that this is not a melon? Even the skin of the melon is almost exactly the same as the winter melon! In fact, the melon that appears in the play is exactly the black-skinned watermelon we want to talk about today.
Many people have not even heard of seedless melons, special phoenix watermelons, unicorn melons, and black-skinned watermelons everywhere on the market now, but in the 80s of the last century, as described in the "Legend of the Melon King", it was favored by many people, and it was the object of cultivation by melon farmers, enterprises and the government.
Before talking about the black-skinned watermelon, let's briefly sort out the history of watermelon.
At present, the earliest written record of watermelon in China is in the Ming Dynasty's "Complete Book of Agricultural Administration", which writes: "Watermelon, planted in the western region, hence the name", so it seems that watermelon is not a product of the mainland, but introduced. When did the ancients start eating watermelon? We don't know. However, someone found watermelon seeds in the western Han tombs, which shows that the western Han people are already eating watermelons. Watermelon seeds have been found in egyptian burial chambers, as well as in 5,000-year-old sites in Libya, and it appears that the culture of eating watermelons has lasted for at least 5,000 years.
Watermelon was really introduced to the Central Plains and became an industry planted by farmers, around the time of the Southern Song Dynasty. There is evidence in the poem of the Southern Song Dynasty famous Humanities Tianxiang, Wen Tianxiang can be called the earliest melon fan, he wrote in the "Watermelon Yin": "A thousand red cherries, a clump of citrine." The lower throat removes the fireworks, and the teeth make an ice and snow sound. "I have to admire that the ancient people really had culture.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, although the ancients did not have refrigerators, some people at that time had learned to put watermelons in cool water and make them into iced watermelons to enjoy. Earlier in the countryside, grandparents would also use this method to ice watermelons.
At present, one of the most grown and most abundant areas of watermelon in the mainland is Shandong. As a large agricultural province, Weifang, Surabaya, Yishui and Heze are rich in fruits, and we can often see apples from these production areas, and watermelons are also cultivated in large quantities in these places.
The black-skinned watermelon, once known as the king of fruits, comes from Yangliu Town, Surabaya County, Shandong Province, which has been growing black-skinned watermelon for more than 30 years. The smallest black-skinned watermelon has about 10 pounds, and the largest can grow to 40-50 pounds.
The reason why it is called black watermelon is because its skin is black, and the texture is almost invisible to the naked eye. This black-skinned watermelon has a very thick flesh, and there are no watermelon seeds, and it is seedless and delicious, of course, it is loved by the public.
There are many uses of black-skinned watermelon, the melon meat can be made into candied fruit, or made into watermelon sauce, melon skin can be used to pickle kimchi, the taste is not worse than sour radish. In short, black-skinned watermelon was very popular at that time.
So why can't you see black-skinned watermelons on the market now?
This is because compared with other watermelon types, black-skinned watermelon has some unavoidable disadvantages.
The first is the price of black-skinned watermelon. Although the unit price of black-skinned watermelon is not much different from other watermelons, because of its huge size and weight, the price of a single melon has become higher, and many people do not need to buy such a large melon, and they also feel that the price is too expensive.
The second reason is that the skin of the black-skinned watermelon is too thick. Imagine that you have made up your mind to buy a twenty or thirty pounds of large watermelon, go home and open everything, good guy, half skin and half meat, who can stand it? Spending money to buy so many watermelon peels, is that not a proper big wrong?
The third reason is that black-skinned watermelons are inconvenient to store. At that time, many people did not have refrigerators, and more than a dozen or twenty pounds of large watermelons were bought at home and put on for two days.
If these three reasons are inconvenient for consumers, then for melon farmers, the difficulty of planting and the late time to market are very difficult problems.
The planting process of black-skinned watermelon is very complicated, pollination needs to be completed manually, and unlike the general melon, a black-skinned watermelon vine can only bear one melon, resulting in a very low yield of watermelon, and the input is not proportional to the harvest. What is more troublesome is that the black-skinned watermelon belongs to the late-ripening melon species, and when the summer comes, other watermelons have been scrambled to be shipped to the whole country, and the black-skinned watermelon is still growing slowly in the field. When people have eaten enough watermelon, black-skinned watermelon appears on the market, and the price is naturally greatly reduced. For melon farmers, it is better to grow other watermelons.
Thick skin, large size, difficult to store, late ripening and difficult to grow are the five reasons why black-skinned watermelon is slowly disappearing in the market.
While we gave up black-skinned watermelons, neighboring Japan was growing and selling them in full swing. Their black-skinned watermelon rinds are darker and look like a bomb. The reason why black-skinned watermelon can have a market in Japan is because Japanese people buy imported watermelons are already very expensive, and black-skinned watermelons are often divided into several small pieces by merchants, and Japanese people only need to buy a small piece on the line, and do not have to buy the whole to cause waste.
In general, in the perception of the Chinese people, watermelon in many fruits, can only be defined as a "cheap and people-friendly fruit", and in the summer consumption is relatively high, every day want to eat, every day is eager to eat fresh. Then the black-skinned watermelon can only continue to be a fruit aristocrat, away from the public.