On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 18:28:08 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:

|

| But I've noticed that the cucumbers I grow are very firm and not like the
| watery ones I used to buy. I wondered if this might be true of melons two or
| more thousand years ago.
|
| Does anyone know - and have a reference?

All foodstuffs, Animal or vegetable have been selectively bred for 6000
years or so, since the agriculture was invented. Thus small hard bitter
???? have become large watery sweet ??? or whatever the cooks thought best
and bullied the farmer into growing. Over the last 100 years we understand
more about how to selectively breed things, so the rate of change has
increased.

At a guess Roman melons would have been much smaller and harder and less
sweet than the modern beast, maybe they would have withstood cooking.

There are usually wild versions of foodstuffs still out there if you can
find them, Split the difference between wild and modern and you may have
what the Romans used. Example sloes became plums.

Dave F