Charentais Melon

If you live in the Touraine Loire Valley you eat Charentais Melon. They are locally grown and everyone agrees -- they are the best melons in the world! No question! Everyone who tries them agrees. We introduce them to our Australian friends who think they are just rockmelon or cantaloupe -- until they try them.

If you are here in July, August and September, then you must eat Charentais Melon. But they are not served as dessert. That would be weird, and very bad for your digestion, apparently -- according to our French friends. No, no, Charentais Melon is served as a starter -- often on its own, unadorned; sometimes with vin d'épine noire (a local port like drink); occasionally with air dried ham. You are also advised not to eat them out of season -- it simply isn't worth the disappointment.

 

 Melons marked by the producer in the order we should eat them.

Charentais Melons are small and they don't ship well, so if you want to enjoy their intense meloniness, you will have to come to us in the summer. Accept no substitutes. They smell like essence of melon and have a beautiful salmon coloured flesh. You can eat them straight, as the French do, or make ice cream or sorbet. Otherwise, don't mess with them. Just eat half a melon a day until the season ends.

The modern variety, with its yellow netted skin and green ribs, was developed in the Poitou-Charente area, just to our south-west, in the 1920s, but the original Charentais Melon goes back to the 15th century, brought here by Charles VIII as a prize from his Italian campaign. He had them grown in the Touraine Loire Valley, close to the many chateaux which were now serving as luxury country residences for the King and his courtiers. By the 16th century the court poet, Pierre de Ronsard, is moved to write a hommage to eating melon in the summer by the side of a stream.

The delicious interior.

Later it was realised that the Charente had a more suitable sunny climate for growing the sweetest melons, and the coming of the railway in the 19th century meant that melons could be sent to the lucrative Paris markets. Two varieties emerged, one with green skin, one with yellow, with the yellow being considered the more succulent. The green ones are more robust and so appear at the beginning of the season, now imported from Morocco or Spain. Many French consumers spurn them as inferior.

As a crop, their yield isn't very high, they don't keep well once ripe and they have a short season, so that coupled with their fragility in shipping has meant that they remain a localised seasonal treat more or less restricted to France. Our nearest growers are concentrated around Richelieu and one of our early memories of coming to this area is of travelling between Chatellerault and Richelieu on a hot summers day. The air was alternately pungent with melon and dung as we drove along through fields of melons scattered amongst fields that had been harvested of wheat and were now being fertilized.

Melons at the market, being sold direct to the public by the producer.

They are now grown in several suitable areas of France from the south-east to the central west. Melons from the south ripen first and come on to the market in mid-May, and you could still see French produced Charentais Melons in September from the central west. Annually, 250 000 tonnes will be harvested by hand in the cool morning air and sold domestically. Because they are already ripe when picked they need to be eaten as soon as possible after harvest.

The best idea is to buy directly from the producer, either at their farm, from temporary roadside stalls or when they come to a farmers market. Let the producer choose your melons and tell them when you want to eat them -- aujourd'hui, demain, après demain (today, tomorrow, the day after). You will pay around €5 for three melons at the height of the season when they are all ripe at once, or about €2.50 for a single melon in early summer.

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