Watermelon, or the Fruit That Is Mostly Water

At the market in the last weeks of summer, a particular transaction plays out that you can watch anywhere from Andalusia to the Uyghur bazaars of western China, in more or less identical choreography. A customer picks up a watermelon. They do not look at it so much as interrogate it: they heft it, feeling for a heaviness that seems excessive for the size. They turn it over to find the pale patch where it sat on the ground, and judge its colour. And then — the decisive gesture — they knock on it with a bent knuckle, cock their head, and listen, with the expression of a doctor sounding a chest. A good watermelon answers with a deep, hollow, almost woody note. A dull, flat thud means the flesh inside has gone mealy or overripe, and the melon is returned to the pile in mild disgrace.

fresh whole and sliced watermelons

Nobody entirely agrees on what the knock actually tells you, and I have met sellers from four countries who each explained the acoustics to me with total confidence and complete mutual contradiction. But everybody does it. It may be the single most universal piece of food folklore on earth — a fruit so large, so opaque, and so completely committed to hiding its quality behind a thick green shell that the entire human species independently arrived at the same solution: hit it, and listen.

The reason for all this ceremony is that a watermelon is an act of faith. You cannot see in. You are buying, sight unseen, something that is by weight about ninety-two per cent water — which is the fruit's whole trick and the source of its name in language after language. In English it is the water-melon; the French pastèque comes through Portuguese from an Arabic word; but across much of the world the "water" is right there in the name, because the thing that makes this fruit remarkable is precisely that it is a way of eating a cold drink. In a hot country before refrigeration, a fruit that is nine-tenths clean, sweet, faintly mineral water, sealed in its own thick protective rind and kept cool in the shade or the well or the river, was not a treat. It was survival infrastructure.

It has been doing this job for a very long time, and — since I promised to look beyond the obvious — nowhere near Italy. The watermelon's story begins in Africa. Its wild ancestors grow across the arid belt of the continent, and the fruit was being cultivated in Egypt at least four thousand years ago; watermelon seeds and painted images of the characteristic striped oval have been found in Egyptian tombs, including, famously, in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The Egyptians seem to have valued it partly as exactly the thing it still is — a store of water — placing it in graves so that the dead would not go thirsty on the long journey. There is something moving in that: a civilisation that understood, four millennia ago, that this heavy green globe was essentially a canteen you could grow, and that you might want one with you in the afterlife.

From Egypt and the Near East the fruit travelled outward along every trade route that would carry it. It reached India, then China, by around the tenth century — which is why, in a linguistic curiosity, the Chinese name xīguā means "western melon," the fruit having arrived from the west along the Silk Road. It spread through the Islamic world, and Moorish Spain grew it long before the rest of Europe took much interest. And when Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the watermelon went with them, and found in the American South a climate it loved, embedding itself so thoroughly there that most Americans now think of it as the definitive fruit of a Fourth of July picnic, with no sense at all of the African fields where it began.

What I find most appealing about the watermelon, though, is not its grand deep history but the specific, various, and slightly surprising ways different cultures have decided to eat it — because a fruit this ubiquitous inevitably accumulates local rituals, and the best of them are the ones that break the rules.

The most important discovery any watermelon culture makes, sooner or later, is that this sweet fruit desperately wants salt and it wants sharp cheese. Across Turkey and the Balkans and much of the eastern Mediterranean, the classic summer supper is watermelon — karpuz in Turkish — served in great cold slabs alongside white cheese: beyaz peynir, or feta, or a slab of salty hellim. It sounds, to the uninitiated, faintly wrong: fruit and cheese, sweet and savoury, breakfast and dessert colliding on one plate. It is, in practice, one of the great flavour combinations of the human diet. The salt of the cheese throws the sweetness of the melon into sharp relief; the dense, tangy cheese answers the fruit's watery lightness; and eaten cold on a hot night, with perhaps a glass of rakı going cloudy beside it, it is very close to a perfect meal. The American South knows the same secret in a plainer form — the old habit of salting a slice of watermelon before eating it — and every child who has tried it has felt the small shock of the sweetness suddenly getting louder.

Then there is the matter of the rind, which most of the world throws away and a wiser minority does not. In the American South, watermelon-rind pickle is an old thrift tradition — the thick white part between flesh and skin, peeled, brined, and put up in sweet spiced vinegar. Across the Middle East and South and East Asia the pale rind is stir-fried, curried, or stewed as a vegetable in its own right. In an age suddenly anxious about food waste, the cultures that never wasted the rind look less like curiosities and more like people who were simply paying attention.

And the seeds, likewise, are a whole food in another hemisphere. Those black seeds that Western children spit competitively across gardens are, in China and across the Middle East, roasted and salted and eaten as a snack in their own right — the seeds sold by the bagful, cracked between the teeth with practised speed. There are varieties of watermelon in parts of Africa and Asia grown not for the flesh at all but for the seeds, the sweet red interior being almost a byproduct. It is a useful reminder that "the watermelon" is not one agreed-upon thing: what counts as the point of the fruit — flesh, rind, seed, water — shifts entirely depending on where you are standing.

There are the transformations, too, the places where the fruit stops being a fruit. In Sicily — I am allowed one Italian example — the watermelon becomes gelu di muluni, that jasmine-scented set pudding I have loved for years. In Iran and across the Middle East the juice is pressed and drunk, sometimes with mint and lime, sometimes fermented. There is a whole modern fashion for grilling watermelon, charring thick steaks of it on the barbecue so the sugars caramelise and the texture turns unexpectedly meaty — a trick that sounds like a chef's affectation but genuinely works. And Russia and Ukraine have long salted and fermented whole small watermelons in barrels, the way you might a cucumber, producing a sharp, fizzy, deeply strange pickled melon that divides opinion violently among everyone who tries it.

But I always come back to the simplest version, because I think the simplest version is the true one. A watermelon does not really want to be a pudding or a pickle or a caramelised steak. It wants to be split open on a hot afternoon, ideally outdoors, ideally slightly too cold, and eaten in dripping crescents by a group of people who are not being at all careful about it. It wants juice running down wrists and off elbows. It wants seeds spat into the grass. It wants to be shared, because it is far too big for one person, which is not an accident but the whole social genius of the thing — a watermelon is a fruit that forces company, that cannot sensibly be eaten alone, that arrives at the table already implying a crowd.

That is what the market ritual is ultimately in service of. The heft, the knuckle-rap, the head cocked to listen — all that careful divination is aimed at a single hot afternoon and a group of sticky, contented people around a collapsing red wreck of rind. When the knock comes back deep and hollow and right, what you are actually being promised is that afternoon. Four thousand years after the Egyptians packed one for the journey out of this world, we are still buying the same thing: something cold and sweet and mostly water, to be shared in the heat, against the long tradition of not being thirsty.

Knock on it. Listen for the hollow note. And then find some people to help you eat it, because you will not manage it by yourself, and you were never meant to.