Wonderful Sweet Scarletts Grapefruit

Compared to the rest of the citrus family, the grapefruit is fairly new. As the offspring of the Pummelo, it most likely first appeared in Jamaica in the 1700s, though no one knows for sure. Some have argued that the grapefruit is actually a cross between the Pummelo and the orange, but there are no records to prove this.

The first description of the grapefruit was by Reverend Griffith Hughes in 1750, when he was searching for the origin of the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. He called it the “forbidden fruit” of Barbados. By 1789, that name had traveled to Jamaica, where the fruit was also called the “smaller shaddock.” In 1814, the “grapefruit” was described in writings by John Lunan as a “variety of the shaddock,” and he also called it the “forbidden fruit.”

The grapefruit was actually smaller than we know it today, approximately the size of an orange when it was first discovered. A French botanist named Chevalier de Tussac wrote in 1820: “I have had the occasion to observe, at Jamaica, in the botanical garden of the Government, a variety of shaddock whose fruits, which are not bigger than a fair orange, are disposed in clusters; the English in Jamaica call this the ‘forbidden fruit’ or ‘smaller shaddock’.”

Grapefruit arrived in the United States in 1823 with Count Odette Phillipe, who brought its seeds from the Bahamas to Florida. But it was not until the late 1800s that the public gained interest in the fruit.