“Frostbite” by Nicola Twilley

Frostbite by Nicola Twilley describes two centuries of development of refrigeration: from ice houses and wooden boxes of ice in the 19th century through early technology for railroad shipment of meat and produce and onward to our current situation where a “Cold Chain” transports optimally chilled food from farm to table. In the US today this huge network ensures that we have fresh produce and meat no matter how far our meals have had to travel. Here’s a summary from the end of the book:

“Since the early days of the ice trade, refrigeration has changed everything about how and what we eat—reshaping trade, transportation, politics, and economics in the process. It has redesigned not only the contents of our plates but also our bodies, our homes, our cities, our landscape, and the global atmosphere. … Fridges have freed women from daily shopping and made fresh food both affordable and available year-round. For some farmers, refrigeration has offered a route to riches—or a way to escape the land. …

“Still, a wholehearted appreciation of those benefits shouldn’t prevent us from counting the cold chain’s costs and considering its alternatives—especially as the rest of the world starts to refrigerate. Some of its disadvantages are inherent to the technology. It takes a lot of energy to remove heat, which has environmental consequences but also tends to create socioeconomic ones, as smaller farmers growing a diversity of foods for local consumption are less likely to benefit than large landholders cultivating export crops at scale. The resulting concentration and intensification have their own ecological impacts. … Other outcomes are enabled by the fridge rather than fundamental to it. Food waste is used as a justification for refrigeration, but refrigeration also seems to encourage waste. … Refrigeration tends to shift where the waste takes place, as opposed to eliminating it. … In short, our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.” (p. 309-310)

Frostbite includes fascinating histories of changes in agriculture, shipping, industry, and domestic life. Refrigeration affects the way food is grown, transported, processed, and sold. Home refrigerators as well as industrial advances made enormous changes not only in what can be purchased and kept on hand in households, but also ultimately in what is eaten. Fresh produce from farms can be quickly chilled, shipped in refrigerated train cars or trucks, held in cold storage facilities, and then delivered to supermarket refrigerators. Produce like tomatoes and bananas is harvested early and ripened on demand. Consumers generally are unaware of this long process or of the surprising age of their "fresh" food. They don’t seem to notice the loss of flavor compared to naturally ripened local and seasonal fruit and vegetables.

Bagged salad mix is an example of a recent invention that depended on refrigeration and changed people’s eating habits. This product required unbelievable new technology to create the storage bags that kept the leaves alive. “Astonishingly, the bag itself—a cheap, disposable plastic lettuce bag—was a miniaturized version of [a] … controlled atmosphere warehouse. The microperforations in its carefully designed films let oxygen in at one rate and carbon dioxide out at another to maintain the ideal atmospheric microclimate around the leaves as they traveled the country and sat on supermarket shelves.” (p. 130)

Orange juice, another revolutionized product, was radically changed after World War II. In its new frozen-concentrate form, it became a commodity product, not something squeezed at home from a seasonal fruit. The availability of frozen orange juice affected both supply and demand, including many newly planted orchards in Florida; innovations in the processing, packaging, shipping, and retail environment; and family habits: “Frozen orange juice, as opposed to fish sticks, ice cream, or TV dinners, was the killer app for home freezers.” (p. 148) Fresh-chill juice, which has largely replaced frozen juice, is a subsequent invention dependent on the “cold chain.”

Every chapter of the book had a few surprises for me as I read. While the author was more focused on the American experience with the progression from ice houses to modern refrigerated warehouses and huge home refrigerators, there’s also quite a bit about the more recent proliferation of refrigeration to other countries — such as China (where we meet a “frozen dumpling millionaire”) and Ruanda (where virtually no cold storage is currently in use at all). The impact of continued expansion of supply-chain dependence on refrigeration, with its enormous and environmentally dangerous energy demands, is very interesting. I’ve read many books about the development of food technology and about changes in agriculture and taste, and this is a good one!

The Earliest Large-Scale Cold Technology

Frostbite described the earliest machinery for managing large quantities of meat and produce, especially for managing large animal carcasses, which require specialized chilling to create meat that is tender and flavorful. As I read, I realized that I had once actually seen such a processing plant that was made into a combined museum and hotel. (It’s not mentioned in the book). 

This relic stands nearly at the southern tip of South America in Puerto Bories, Puerto Natales, Chile. The Puerto Natales region once raised sheep and cattle to be shipped to England via the docks of this town. The now-hotel preserves probably the most complete example of an early 20th century meat shipping facility with its interesting technology. Note that via modern air travel, we took around 3 days to get to Puerto Natales from North America, as it’s not even close to the nearest airport, which is in Puento Arenas — a truly remote place. Here are some photos from our trip in 2017.

This is the pier where the refrigerator ships once were loaded with frozen meat headed to England. Two black-necked swans are in front of the pier. Our reason to travel so far was seeing both scenery and wildlife.

A view from our room in the hotel. We stayed here one night on our tour of Patagonia and then continued to Torres del Paine, a Chilean national park. Then we traveled by ship to see more wildlife and scenery.

Looking out of the hotel you see the contrast to what was once a busy dock area.
The slaughter house and packing plant operated from 1913 to 1993.

I find the look of the old equipment — which was all imported from England — fascinating and beautiful, with its bright colors and complex patterns. But what are we seeing? In one room there is a huge electric-generating plant that supplied power not only for the factory, but for the town. In the meat-cooling areas, electric compressors turned ammonia vapor to liquid. Held in sealed coils it circulated and turned back from liquid to vapor, which removed heat from the surroundings and thus acted as a refrigerant. The scale was large enough to process large numbers of slaughtered animals and have them ready to load on ships at the dock.

To get from the reception and dining areas of the hotel to the bedrooms, one walks past the equipment that once was used to slaughter, butcher, chill, and prepare meat to be shipped from the nearby dock.

Chilling meat is important for both preserving and making it palatable: “For most of refrigeration’s short history, humans have focused on its ability to stop spoilage by slowing down the reproduction of bad bacteria. But in the much longer annals of meat eating, cool air has been equally, if not more, appreciated for its ability to ripen red meat, turning dry, tough muscle fiber into a juicy, savory steak.” (p. 98)

The Hotel in the Factory

The breakfast buffet is in one of the many converted areas where meat packing once took place.

 

The Singular Hotel, Patagonia, Chile.

 Photos of the hotel © 2017 mae sander.

Blog post and book review © 2024 mae sander

"Hesperides" -- A Very Obscure Book

Library copy of Hesperides.

Hesperides: A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits by Samuel Tolkowsky is hard to find, though fortunately for me, I have checked out the library copy shown above.

Title page.

I find the obscurity of this book surprising, as it's full of fascinating and useful information. John McPhee cites it in his book Oranges; in fact, I think he used a variety of information from it in his historical section. Tolkowsky begins in ancient times, with the origins of citrus trees on the slopes of the Himalayas and in the boundary areas between India and China, and a grapefruit-like fruit in the Malay archipelago. The earliest written records of citrus are in China in a compendium dated around 500 BCE, including a number of older works that refer to the fruit. (p. 6)

Citrus spread through Asia and North Africa, and eventually to Europe, as Tolkowsky documents in several chapters. I found the descriptions of the introduction of citrus fruits into ancient Israel especially interesting. Tolkowsky traces the customs of the holiday of Succoth -- the Feast of Tabernacles -- to the influence of the Persians during their exile in the sixth century, and the introduction of these customs when they returned thanks to the decree of Cyrus. At this point, as the citron was as yet not known in Babylonia, the fruit that served in the ritual was not an etrog (citron), but a cedar cone, which appears in a number of images from that era.

By the second century of this era, the Jewish writings in the Mishnah definitely interpret the ritual fruit as an etrog; the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus also says this, saying "it was the 'Persian apple' that was used by the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles." Tolkowsky continues the story: "The very earliest documentary evidence of the citron in Jewish sources is found in the representation of this fruit on coins struck by Simon the Maccabee in the fourth year of the 'Redemption of Zion,' that is, in 136 BC. If citrons were extensively grown in Palestine at the time, it seems probable that the center of the industry was at Jaffa." (p. 53)

Simon the Maccabee issued copper coins (above) bearing the picture of a citron
together with the bundle of myrtle, willow and palm branches prescribed
for use at the Feast of Tabernacles.  

Because Simon the Maccabee was the only Jewish ruler who depicted the etrog on his coins, Tolkowsky believes that Simon was the one who introduced the citron in place of the cedar cone.

Above: a bronze seal with Jewish symbols including an etrog. Below: a decorated glass vase including
an etrog and other fruits. From the Roman era.

Citrons were the earliest citrus fruits introduced into Europe, and Tolkowsky includes several chapters describing how later, oranges and lemons arrived in Roman times. Tolkowsky's illustrations include many Roman mosaics and other art works depicting oranges and lemons.

A detail of a mosaic from Pompeii.

Several chapters describe the ways that citrus fruits appear symbolically and literally in European art and literature from Roman times until the Renaissance and early modern period. The development of culinary uses for the fruits are very interesting also. Hesperides is rich in historical information that's not easy to find.

Some notes on Tolkowsky:

I managed to find a brief memoir of Samuel Tolkowsky and his family in Raphael Patai's memoir Journeyman in Jerusalem: Memories and Letters, 1933-1947. Patai (a well-known author) describes the "at home" Fridays at the home of Samuel Tolkowsky and his wife, beginning in 1933. Patai, a young man newly arrived in Jerusalem, met the family in 1933, when Samuel Tolkowsky was 47 years old. Tolkowsky, Patai says, was born in Belgium to Polish-Jewish parents, served as a member of the Zionist Political Committee under Chaim Weizmann in London during World War I, and settled in Palestine in 1919. During World War II, he headed the Citrus Control and Marketing Board set up by the British government there. Patai eventually married Naomi, the Tolkowsky's daughter. (source)

A family tree posted at Geni gives Tolkowsky's dates as June 27, 1886, to December 19, 1965, and lists his parents, wife, and children.

Tolkowsky was the author of a number of other books that are even more obscure than Hesperides. Examples from google book search: The Gateway of Palestine: A History of Jaffa (1925) and The Jewish Colonisation in Palestine, Its History and Its Prospects (1914).

Even Wikipedia seems to have nothing about Hesperides or its author! Several years ago, Hesperides was listed in amazon.com but no longer seems to be there, as I guess they never had a copy come up for sale. A few years ago one sold at Bonham's for £312 (US$ 443), according to the Bonham's website.

The Mysterious Orange

Know’st thou the land where lemon-trees do bloom,

And oranges like gold in leafy gloom;

A gentle wind from deep blue heaven blows,

The myrtle thick, and high the laurel grows?*

This poem by J.W.von Goethe, published in 1795, expresses the longing of a person from the north for the beauties of Italy and the Mediterranean climate. Why did Goethe use citrus fruits as the exotic image of the far-off places being dreamed about?

From the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum, photo taken 2016.
Oranges always seem to have mythic significance.

Beginning in Classical Antiquity, lemons and oranges have taken on a variety of meanings in art, religion, literature, and cuisine. Citrus trees were raised for their beauty in climates where they couldn't bear much fruit. Orange or lemon juice was used as a sour or bitter condiment before sweet varieties of oranges were cultivated and eaten raw. Dishes like duck with oranges have been popular since the Renaissance.

Ottolenghi's creation of chicken with clementines and fennel
is in the spirit of historic dishes combining citrus with duck or other fowl.

Citrus history is full of mysteries. Just when did each variety of lemon, lime, shaddock, grapefruit, sweet orange, blood orange, bitter orange, navel orange, tangerine, clementine, manderin, satsuma, kumquat, bergamot, or citron appear, and who distributed the fruit and planted the trees? Each variety has its own history, beginning with the origins of citrus in the Himalayas at least 2,000 years ago. Some varieties date from these early times; others originated as recently as the late 19th century. Tracing the names used at different times in various languages helps to learn the history, but speculation is often the only response to such complex questions.

The Orangerie at Versailles, photo taken 2013. Orange trees were loved
for their beauty in gardens, and cultivated for appearance as well as for fruit.

In northern climates, oranges and other citrus fruits were always scarce, and normally only available to the richest people. Palaces and chateaus often had an orangerie, where citrus could be grown out of season; the one at Versailles was particularly large. Royal gardeners grew citrus trees in large boxes, requiring huge numbers of laborers to care for them and move them indoors and out depending on the season.

The large fruit is a citron that grew in Janet's garden in Israel.
 With the citron: lemons from the market. Photo taken 2016.

In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, oranges were associated visually with images of the Madonna,** and often appear in icons painted for churches or private use. Pious Jewish citrus merchants, beginning as early as Roman times, supplied citrons for the fall holiday of Succoth -- the citron had replaced the cedar cone (a similarly-shaped fruit) during around the first century before the common era. By the early modern era, these dealers were influential in creating markets for citrus, as well as supplying citrons for ritual use.

Orange groves around the Mediterranean in Spain, North Africa, Jaffa, and Italy constantly grew in economic importance. English crusaders first saw oranges when they embarked from their ships in Jaffa. Columbus brought orange trees to the Caribbean on one of his later voyages. Early modern travelers like Goethe dreamed of lemons and oranges in Italy while travelers in the 19th century saw them at exotic places like the Alhambra. By the beginning of the 20th century, oranges were sold at Christmas even for middle class buyers, and soon the railroads and cargo ships brought citrus to European and American cities year-around.

1920s orange crate label.

Orange groves in California and Florida developed as big agriculture starting in the late 19th century. Rail transport and cargo ships made it possible to deliver large quantities of citrus to American consumers in cities, and oranges became the miracle fruit for almost all classes, not just the well-off. Canned juice, then frozen juice, then fresh-pack juice were developed as essentially industrial products, with widespread advertising campaigns to create demand and convince the public of the great health benefits of drinking orange juice. Labor as always is an issue, with orange pickers working long hours for little pay.

My culinary history reading group discussed John McPhee's book about the history of oranges in Florida in the twentieth century, and I went back to read three other books about the history of oranges. Our group particularly admired John McPhee's style and his captivating way of portraying the many people in the orange growing business in Florida. His sketches of the lives of advertising men, grove owners, fruit pickers, and many others enlivened his description of the history of citrus in Florida. Though out of date (the book has not been revised since its publication in 1966) the book brings a lot of the business of citrus to life. We wish there would be an update to tell us about modern issues like labor challenges, water consumption, climate change, and changing demand from consumers of orange juice.

Booklist on which I based my very brief summary of millennia of citrus history:

• John McPhee, Oranges. Published 1966. (I wrote about it here.)
• Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Published 2005. (I wrote about it here.)
• S. Tolkowsky, Hesperides: A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits. Published 1938.
• Pierre Laszlo, Citrus: A History. Published 2007. (I wrote about it here and here.)

NOTES:

*For anyone who is more knowledgeable in German than I am the original is:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,

Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, 

Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht? 

Kennst du es wohl?

Dahin! dahin

Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.

**Below is the painting "Madonna of the Victories" by Mantegna, where the Virgin is surrounded by garlands of oranges and lemons. (Left, the painting; right, a detail of the garlands.)

Sunkist Oranges and Birds Eye Peas

Wednesday night I attended the regular meeting of the Culinary Book Club that I belong to. We read Birdseye by Mark Kurlansky, a biography of Clarence Birdseye. The subject of the bio developed processes for frozen food technology: how to freeze it quickly with a variety of huge devices, package it with new materials that survived freezing, and keep it frozen -- besides industrial freezing machines, he also developed less expensive refrigeration units for shipping and storing it in markets. Birdseye began with his own business, and then sold his idea to a company that could invest more in the project than he could raise. 

That company became General Foods, and Birdseye, whose name became synonymous with frozen food (especially peas) ran a food lab for them for a number of years. I found him interesting both for having changed American food, including ideas for distribution to grocers and inventing freezers where they could store the foods he froze, and for his amazingly adventurous attitude towards eating and trying exotic foods and small game animals that most of his peers would not have accepted.

Birdseye also invented a variety of other very practical things such as a reflector lightbulb. He traveled to a number of spots in the New World, like Labrador -- where he got the idea for frozen food, which in its time was a big improvement over canning. The discussion was fun; some of us talked about our memories of refrigerators, ice men, ice boxes, and home freezers. One woman described how she received an upright freezer for a wedding present when she had almost no money, but her family considered it essential. 

This week also, I read another book, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden by Douglas Cazaux Sackman. It's a more academic study but very well-written. It details the history of the orange industry in California -- and it was really an industry, allied with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, orange-grove owners figured out  how to mass-produce uniform fruits, which became a commodity. The growers' association united the rich owners of large groves, who marketed collectively under the still-well-known name Sunkist.

The industry pioneered ways of advertising to create demand, including medical studies commissioned to show how important oranges were to health. Sound familiar? It was done again, perhaps more dishonestly, this decade by pomegranate producers in California, though the author doesn't mention that.

The book answers one question I had wondered about in the past: when did oranges become common rather than a special treat to be eaten only at Christmas. I loved the description of a Sunkist ad where a woman asks a small grocer for oranges, and he says he stocks them only at Christmas -- but the point of the ad is that the bigger supermarkets, which were cooperating with the orange growers and railroads, were beginning to stock them all year. I believe this was in the 1920s, by which time piles of perfect oranges were on display in markets throughout the land, and people were becoming convinced to drink OJ for breakfast daily and feed it to babies.

Further, the book documents how mass orange-growing was an industry with political implications for labor and unions, use of pesticides and other poisons, immigration, racism, exploitation of land and workers by rich growers, water rights, and a number of other issues that started 100 years ago and haven't been resolved in America. One radical critic of the terrible labor practices and union-busting efforts referred to the oranges as Gunkist! The conflicts involved a number of very famous Americans and famous books like Grapes of Wrath of course, as well as a fascinating governor's race in which the author Upton Sinclair almost won on a very radical platform. (The growers and railroads used a negative campaign to defeat him in the last 6 weeks: makes me shudder!)

Most of the California groves have now been replaced by housing developments and urbanization; for example, Disneyland replaced orange groves. Both books are very very American stories that reveal interesting developments in American foodways.

"Oranges"

Today I read Oranges by John McPhee. Published in 1967, and still in print, the book is a little like a time capsule. The main focus of the book is on the Florida orange industry of 40 to 50 years ago.

In the 1960s, the Florida orange-growing industry was in transition from producing and shipping fresh fruit up the east coast. The invention of frozen orange juice had just made a huge change. Instead of selecting and packing fruit, growers now sent them to nearby factories, in which the more imaginative businessmen among them were investing their money.

Instead of juice or fruit whose flavor varied from season to season, from tree to tree, and even from one orange section to another, the factories blended multiple types of concentrated, processed, frozen juice (which tastes, he says, like a blend of sugar and aspirin) with a little of the real thing.

At this point in the sixties, consumers had gladly switched over from squeezing oranges to reconstituting the stuff in the little frozen cans. McPhee discussed the sociology of this: the blue-collar families of his day were still drinking canned juice, while the educated consumer had embraced the frozen, and hardly anyone still squeezed their own. And the juice box, like the pasteurized OJ that's now most popular, was as yet unthought of.

As McPhee traveled the byways of rural Florida (remember, before Disney), he found that even the orange juice stands that remained out of a sense of tradition were serving reconstituted juice. Further, his interviews with growers, pickers, and factory owners revealed that many orange groves were being cleared for new land use -- the NASA facility at Cape Canavaral was in the process of being built on former groves. Above all, he wrote about the frenzy of effort to create new chemical orange juice surrogates. Add water to some crystals they were inventing -- they thought you would get orange juice. (I think they got Tang, but it was in the future and they were still optimistic.)

The material on the Florida industry is augmented by McPhee's brief -- though well-written -- overview of the history and social uses of oranges. He describes their origins in China, mentions the orange as an art motif especially in the Renaissance, presents the love of French kings and their peers for Orangeries, and says a few general words about orange juice drinking habits among various cultures of the world. Good job!

The top image here shows the current edition, which I have not seen. The second image is of my library book, a first edition from 1967. The graphic choices of the two covers support my time-capsule viewpoint.

Citrus Citrus Citrus!

Everyone thinks about citrus at this time of year. I've been reading Citrus: A History, as I've mentioned. Today, the L.A.Times food section went over the top:

100 things to do with a Meyer lemon

The local Whole Foods has Meyer lemons all the time, so I have developed a taste for them as a squeeze on fish or chicken dishes. I admit, I also like to eat a wedge of Meyer lemon now and then: not quite as sour as a generic lemon. (Those were Meyer lemons in the trout dish I made a few weeks ago -- see Trout.)

Plus in another article: "Blood oranges: These crimson-fleshed citrus fruits are another produce item that has gone almost instantly from obscure to commonplace. It wasn't so long ago that you practically had to travel to Sicily to find them. Now they're in grocery stores." See: Oranges that taste of summer berries by Russ Parsons.

More on "Citrus: A History"

Pierre Laszlo's Citrus: A History is an uneven book, slueing from one topic to another in a sometimes dizzying way. He revisits his childhood in wartime Grenoble, France, and moves among Chinese, Arab, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, Californian, Brazilian histories. He gives both recipes for dishes like tarte au citron and detailed analysis of the chemistry of orange peel. He analyzes a number of poems and paintings, and then goes back to questions of horticulture.

In my final impression of the book, I feel that he includes a great deal of interesting material. While the weakest section of the book is his effort to interpret a number of poems, I really liked his section on painting. Here are a few more paintings with related quotes from the book:

"A Vase with Oranges" by Matisse.

Laszlo finds that there is "new logic at work in this 1916 painting. The bowl of oranges has dropped from all-important subject to mere pretext. The painting is calling attention to itself. The subject of the composition is the composition itself.... The painting by Zurbaran, as we saw, aimed at religious emotion. ... In the obverse paradox, the Matisse painting of oranges jettisons traditional rules of representation. In so doing it achieves a fullness of emotion.
This emotion came from Matisse's passion for oranges. The sight of them caused small daily epiphanies. Oranges were portents of joy, of the beauty in life."

Still Life with a Basket of Oranges by Matisse

"One of the proudest moments in Matisse's professional life was when Picasso in 1945 purchased his 1912 Still Life with a Basket of Oranges. This gave such pleasure to Matisse that henceforth, on New Year's Day, he would have a basket of oranges sent to his friend and great rival." And today, Matisse's painting is owned by the Musee Picasso in Paris.

"Still Life with Oranges, Lemons and Blue Gloves"
by Van Gogh

Laszlo writes about the late 19th century painters: "The Impressionists were responsible for the resurrection of citrus fruits as objects worthy of depiction. Paul Cezanne, of the legendary apples, would often include oranges in his still lifes. With him, the interest shifted to the light and the forms, away from the texture and the naturalistic details that he seventeenth-century Dutch painters had been so keen on. Vincent van Gogh, with his fascination with the color yellow -- which some have blamed on absinthe and some on the professional disease of pica, which makes the sufferer crave camphor and turpentine -- included lemons in his still lifes, such as Still Life with Oranges, Lemons and Blue Gloves."

I say: what a pity, to reduce the genius of Van Gogh to a diagnosis, rather than to see him as transcending illness with art. But that's my opinion.

And to top off my opinion, here is a masterpiece that illuminates the symbolism of citrus (along with other symbols such as the bunch of coral above the Virgin's head and the Mandela) in the early Renaissance -- a work painted prior to any that Laszlo discusses. Below is Mantegna's Madonna of the Victories, along with a detail from the painting. It dates from 1496, when citrus culture was relatively new, though well known to Mangna's employers in Mantua, Italy, especially to Isabella d'Este, wife of the Marquis. I wonder how Laszlo missed this.

Oranges and Lemons

I remember admiring this painting, Zurbaran's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633), in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. According to the museum's website: "The citrons are a paschal fruit and, with the orange blossoms, suggest chastity. Love and purity are symbolized in the rose and water-filled cup. An air of gravity and spiritual austerity proceeds from the strict horizontal rhythm and the limitation of detail. Indeed, the objects appear to have a mystical allusion, just like the votive offerings on an altar." (Comments on Francisco de Zurbarán, Spanish, 1598-1664, Norton Simon Museum website .)

In the book Citrus: A History, author Pierre Laszlo takes a broader view of the painting. He points out the significance of the Asian origins of citrus, the rose, and the porcelain. In earlier chapters of the book, he had in fact traced the introduction of orange-growing, which originated in the Far East, and traveled along various trade routes through Arab lands and the Mediterranean. He thus presents a conjecture: "that the spirituality of this painting ... derives from Eastern mysticisms, such as Sufi mysticism and its placement of the supreme value on purity." He sees an allegory: "To look at this painting is to open oneself, one's inner life, to a transcendental notion." (Citrus: A History, p. 163)

Although not usually so classified, Laszlo sees this as a religious painting: "symbolic homage to the Virgin Mary," especially indicated by the symbolism of the rose (divine love, purity), the lemons and oranges (chastity), and the citrus blossoms (fecundity). Laszlo connects this symbolism to the earlier Arab and Jewish presence in Spain. It's all very interesting, but I really wonder if he could demonstrate the connections he proposes.

I am enjoying Laszlo's book: the extremely broad interpretation of Zurbaran's painting is an example of his approach to the topic -- wide-ranging, very personal, based on historic details but refusing to be limited by them.

More prosaic history in the book is also very interesting. Several years ago, I attempted to find out when and how orange juice became a commodity part of the American breakfast. Using obscure pamphlets in the University of Michigan library, I managed to find our some answers, concerning the development of citrus groves in Florida and California at the end of the 19th century, the development of railroad transport to major East-coast cities, the invention of the industrial process for making frozen OJ concentrate, and the creation of public awareness and taste for their products. Among many other parts of the history of citrus fruit, Laszlo now presents this material in a popular and accessible format. There are lots of other topics covered as well.