A Sweet & Sour Story

The orange has a most exotic and well-traveled past. The wild parent, C. aurantium, is native to the Caspian and southeast Asia; its name derives from the Sanskrit nareng. This orange is a late traveler. Its first mention west of China doesn’t appear until 100 ce, in an Indian religious text. It seems to have moved slowly west along overland trade routes and then north into Europe with the Arab diaspora. By the eleventh century the wild orange (also called bitter or Seville orange) was growing in Sicily, and by the end of the twelfth, in Spain.