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A forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name (2021)

Medieval Europeans were fanatical about a strange fruit that could only be eaten rotten. Then it was forgotten altogether. Why did they love it so much? And why did it disappear?

In 800AD, Charlemagne included it on a list of plants that were mandatory in the king's many gardens, and nearly 200 years later, the English abbot and writer Ælfric of Eynsham first committed its rather rude sobriquet to the public record. It's featured in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and the two-time queen consort Anne of Brittany's Book of Hours – a kind of illustrated religious manuscript popular in the Middle Ages. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he draws a comparison with the fruit – " But if I fare as dooth an open-ers" – to lament the onset of old age and how he doesn't think men achieve their full ability to lie, boast, covet and become angry until they're weakened and elderly.

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