Cooking Melons

These are grown in India, China, Japan, and SE Asia. They are not sweet and are used for cooking like other vegetable gourds. Oil may be pressed from the seeds. See also wax gourd.

The best known of the ‘cooking melons’ is the pale, elongated variety called pickling melon or Chekiang melon, which is grown from Thailand through SE China to Japan. As its name suggests, it is pickled as well as being eaten fresh. The most important melon of this kind grown in India is known as kakhi/kakri and used to be classified as C. melo var utilissima, the last word of which name is borne out by a passage cited by Watt (1889–96):

This appears to me to be by far the most useful species of [the genus]; when little more than half-grown, they are oblong, and a little downy; in this state they are pickled; when ripe they are about as large as an ostrich’s egg, smooth and yellow; when cut they have much the flavour of the melon, and will keep good for several months, if carefully gathered without being bruised, and hung up; they are also in this stage eaten raw, and much used in curries.