A Tangerine By Any Other Name

Did you ever wonder whatever happened to tangerines?  I did.   Tangerines were one of my favorite fruits as a child from way back even before Vietnam was a dominant part of the American consciousness.  I lived in an eternal present, so if there was a cycle to their abundance it escaped me.  It seemed to be a perpetual choice.  They seemed to be part of my regular consumption, the final course of a bag lunch-- the reward for toughing it through a liverwurst sandwich, say-- throughout my formative years.  Their fading from my diet was gradual, so much so that I can't say with any certainty when they dropped from the menu for me, but certainly by the time I was married in the 80's, when I ever thought to look for them, they were nowhere.  When my daughter was young, we never seemed to find them at the supermarket either, and when I’d lament about it, the tangerines that my wife would bring home from her excursions in an attempt to assuage me were not the same.  They were basically oranges.  They recalled to my mind the fruit with the portmanteau sounding name of tangelo that seemed to have at some point usurped the tangerine in my bag lunches of the 70s-- an unsolicited, unwelcome and poor substitution.  If those still exist, who cares?  What happened to tangerines?   

What I remember were small fruit, easy to peel, almost seedless.  Sure every year around the winter solstice, my daughter had clementines from Spain which were similarly small and easily peelable, but those were clementines.  Now there are Halos, which we’ve started buying regularly. Eating those I started to think, “Hmm, these seem a lot like the lost fruit of my youth called a tangerine.”  But the bag they come in calls them mandarins.  

When I spoke out loud about this to my wife, her memory from childhood in the same era as mine but in a different region of the country, was of the orange-y like “tangerines” that were hard to peel and pulpy and nothing like the tangerines of my childhood.  She got annoyed with me for carping about it.  But the more I experienced Halos, the more convinced I was that they were a close cousin of the tangerine if not exactly the same thing.  And really, how could something so yummy and satisfying disappear from the face of the earth with no fanfare at all?

So I googled it and sure enough, the term tangerine is nearly interchangeable with both mandarin oranges and clementines.  Some sites-- wikipedia for instance-- refer to a tangerine as a kind of mandarin.  Others refer to a mandarin as a kind of tangerine.  Thank goodness we have the internet to clear it up for us.  

I still don’t know why as children we called them tangerines but today they’re called clementines or mandarins-- marketing must somehow be involved-- but at least that mystery is solved to my satisfaction.  You’re welcome!