What ever happened to white grapefruit?

[Thanks for the Crepes]

I remember grapefruit that looked like those in the NYT article with the brown trails of mottling on the skin! I enjoyed these as a kid and don't remember eating pink or red much, if at all. Now, I usually have access to both red and white, but I noticed on Sunday, when I picked up a red one, that there were no white on offer. The white ones I see now have pretty perfect-looking skins with none of the mottling on what might have been the Duncan variety of my childhood. When I've eaten the modern white ones that I can get, they seem to me more bitter, and not as nice as the reds. The reds I get, and they are from supermarkets, taste better to me. When you're buying produce from the supermarket, you are very rarely privy to a name for the type of fruit/veggie you are buying and eating. 

 

The reds I get here have plenty of seeds though. I don't mind the large ones that are easy to pop out with a knife or serrated grapefruit spoon, but I really dislike those teeny seedlings which are not only hard to see, but seem sometimes to cling tenaciously in the fruit, and they are myriad. If I could find a grapefruit with a lot of larger seeds that separate easily from the fruit in a good-tasting grapefruit, it wouldn't matter the color or having a lot of large seeds.

 

On 1/21/2007 at 8:19 PM, petite tête de chou said:

Something that hasn't been mentioned is how *pretty* pink/red grapefruit rinds and segments are. We're definitely a visual species.

 

Not only very insightful, but it brings to mind a line from the movie "Black Swan". Natalie Portman's character is eating a red grapefruit and says, "How pretty and pink." It is the only thing we see her eat in this movie. Ballerinas, like fashion models, have to severely restrict their eating. This really resonates with me. The movie came out three years after the quote here.