Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century author of The Three Musketeers, so loved melons that he offered to give all his published manuscripts to the French municipality of Cavaillon in exchange for supplying him with twelve melons a year for the rest of his life. This love of the melon was perhaps shared by the Greeks, who cultivated the fruit and called it melopepon, a name they derived from their word melon, meaning apple, and pepon, a word denoting a variety of gourd eaten only when fully ripe; the ancient Greeks, therefore, considered the melon an apple-gourd. In Latin, the Greek name of this fruit was borrowed in an abbreviated form, melo, which evolved into the French melon before entering English at the end of the fourteenth century. The pepon part of the Greek melopepon was not utterly lost, however. It was adopted into English, also at the end of the fourteenth century, as a name for the large fruit we now know as pumpkin. Later, in the mid sixteenth century, pepon acquired a rival when English borrowed the word pompion from French, pompion itself having evolved from the Latin pepon. By the mid seventeenth century, pompion had not only driven pepon out of existence, it had also undergone a transformation of spelling and pronunciation of its own, ending up as the familiar pumpkin. Finally, in the mid nineteenth century, pumpkin gave rise to pumpkinification, a word meaning extreme and uncritical glorification. The term originated as a translation of the Latin apocolocyntosis, used by Seneca, a Roman philosopher and dramatist who parodied the apotheosis of the emperor Claudius Caesar as a transformation into a pumpkin.
Discover the fruit borne of a trailing plant, thriving under the open skies of sun-kissed and moist climates, or cultivated within the sheltered confines of greenhouses. Melons, as they are affectionately known, encompass a multitude of enticing varieties. While their nutritional profile may be modest, with the exception of the cantaloup variety that emerges as an excellent source of vitamins A and C, melons offer a respite from the heat as a refreshing dessert. Embrace their juicy allure and relish in their capacity to invigorate the palate with their invigorating flavors.