A 2,000-year-old Roman toilet in Switzerland yielded an unexpected discovery: 19 large seeds from a fruit medieval Europe was obsessed with, but which has now vanished so completely that professional botanists often can't identify it.
The medlar was politely named, but for 900 years it went by "open-arse"—a reference to its distinctive bottom, reports the BBC. The French weren't more delicate, calling it "monkey's bottom," "donkey's bottom," and "dog's bottom." Despite the crude names, it appeared in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Henry VIII planted medlars at Hampton Court. By the 1600s, they were as common as apples across England.
The fruit's strange appeal came with a catch: medlars had to rot before you could eat them. Fresh off the tree, they caused violent diarrhea. But after weeks decomposing in sawdust, enzymes transformed the hard, bitter flesh into something sweet with the texture of baked apples and a flavor like over-ripe dates mixed with lemon. This process, called "bletting," made medlars one of the only winter sources of sugar in medieval times.
The medlar disappeared from British shops in the 1950s when tropical fruits became cheaper. But near the Caspian Sea, where it originated 3,000 years ago, the fruit remains popular in markets across Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Previously:
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• Taste Test: Passion fruit
• Very handy numeric guide to those little stickers on fruit
