The Mysterious Grapefruit’s Debut in Seattle
Before the grapefruit was a breakfast staple, local merchants were mystified by the 'shaddock,' a strange, fickle fruit that could leave an unsuspecting eater with a sour face.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
People have their mouths made up for the tastes of age. The acidulous, pungent tang of the shaddock is at once set down as disagreeable by the uninitiated; shaddocks must be eaten rightly, and really to like them is almost an acquired taste. Very few of the people who eat shaddocks do so at first. Most people had to learn to like them. The slow growth in popular favor of the shaddock is that it is impossible to tell by the appearance of a shaddock whether it is ripe or not. An unripe shaddock is as disagreeable to the taste as a ripe one is pleasant, and it often happens that an experimenter's first shaddock is a green one, and he cannot be induced to eat shaddocks because of this one.
'I have seen a little twig no bigger than my little finger,' said a fruit dealer yesterday, 'with five or six big shaddocks on it. A comparatively small tree will often bear as many as 2,000 shaddocks at a time. Down South they are much liked, and nearly everybody eats them. But in the North they are little known. I presume there are 300 or 400 barrels of them sold here in Washington each week, though the sales this season have not been as large as last. They are sometimes called grapefruit, on account of their tart flavor, and there is a quite general impression that shaddocks grow on vines; but Southern people, so the story goes, for want of a better name, gave them that of the navy captain who introduced the fruit in this country.'
“An unripe shaddock is as disagreeable to the taste as a ripe one is pleasant, and it often happens that an experimenter's first shaddock is a green one.”
Today, the grapefruit is a standard grocery item, but this 1890s dispatch captures the 'early adopter' anxiety of the late 19th-century food scene in Seattle. It highlights how globalization of produce—once an exotic curiosity—eventually reshaped the local diet, much like the changing food markets in Seattle's rapidly densifying neighborhoods today.
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