Project to revive Montreal melon hope Québécois nostalgia will bear fruit where others have failed | Canada Voices

Diners at white-tablecloth restaurants in Gilded Age America might sit down for a glass of Champagne, a tin of caviar and, for dessert, a slice of Montreal melon.

The Canadian delicacy was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century, coveted, researched, and lavishly paid for by gourmets on both sides of the Atlantic. It was “succulent,” and $30 a serving (inflation-adjusted).

Then, as suddenly as the Montreal melon came to prominence, it disappeared – from restaurant menus, markets and even seed catalogues. For half a century its existence was barely a rumour.

In the 1990s, spurred by curiosity about this fabled fruit, and the incongruity of a famous melon coming from Quebec, a group of intrepid writers and farmers tried to revive it, with limited success.

But today, another revival is under way, and its participants believe it may just catch on. A powerful cocktail of nostalgia, foodieism and environmental consciousness is at work.

A horticultural renaissance is close to fruition.

The Montreal melon appears to have been first grown in the 1870s, primarily in the west-end neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Now middle-class residential, it was once the city’s market garden, with a microclimate produced by the sheltering slopes of Mount Royal.

The melon went by many names at the time, but was commonly called the Montreal Green Nutmeg for the colour of its flesh and its richly spiced flavour.

Maybe it was the proximity to a nearby racetrack and its endless supply of horse manure, but the things were huge, often bigger than a pumpkin.

The taste was apparently spectacular as well. Near the end of the decade, a visitor – from Paris, no less – proclaimed its flavour more delicate than that of any melon he had ever tasted.

Soon, agents from the big American seed catalogues such as Burpee were sniffing around Montreal farmers’ markets, buying melons by the dozen, and discarding everything but the precious seeds.

Cultivating the melon in the United States never really caught on, though, possibly because of how finicky it was to grow.

Thin-skinned and easily bruised, the prized fruit had to be grown off the ground, slung up in silk stockings or gunny sacks “like a jockstrap,” said Montreal-area farmer Ken Taylor.

The families that dominated the industry, the Gormans and the Décaries, also closely guarded the melon’s genetic information, aiming to build a monopoly.

But Americans had developed a taste for the Montreal Green Nutmeg, and they had to be shipped south somehow. Eventually, the melons would be placed in straw-filled wicker baskets, like enormous Easter eggs, for the train ride to New York and Boston, with a cheesecloth sewn shut over top.

At the grand hotels on the Eastern Seaboard, an exotic taste of French Canada became a standard feature of high-class dining. “You would get your Champagne from Reims, your caviar from Russia and your melon from Montreal,” Mr. Taylor said. “It was in that elite class of snob food.”

The decline and fall of the Montreal melon began around the time of the Great Depression.

Cars were starting to replace four-legged fertilizer machines, expanding the borders of cities and turning farmers’ fields into suburbs. In Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the biggest local landowners sold their acreage to housing developers.

The Depression may have been the final blow for a luxury product that few could afford anymore. In the throes of the unemployment that gripped Montreal in the 1930s, there were armed guards posted in the melon fields to deter thieves, said Quebec author and museum curator Sébastien Hudon.

By the 1950s, even the Burpee seed catalogue, which helped put the Montreal melon on the map, had forsaken its former star cultivar.

Time was simply up for the Montreal Green Nutmeg. It happens, in the history of food. The Ansault pear and the Taliaferro apple were believed to be uniquely delicious in the 19th century before falling by the wayside thanks to changing agricultural practices and consumer tastes.

”Empires come and go,” said Mr. Taylor, the farmer. “The empire of the Montreal melon has faded.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Barry Lazar started brushing the dust off the archeological ruins. A Montreal journalist and filmmaker, Mr. Lazar lived in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on a street called Old Orchard and wondered to himself how it got that name. There was no sign of any orchards in the paved paradise of NDG.

After digging around in the archives, he published a column in the Montreal Gazette detailing the colourful agricultural history of his residential neighbourhood, including the existence of a once-famous fruit known as the Montreal melon.

Gazette reporter Mark Abley read the piece and was fascinated. After some impressive research, he tracked down the Montreal melon in a U.S. Department of Agriculture seed bank in Ames, Iowa.

Naturally, Mr. Abley asked to be sent a few. Armed with the seeds, he went to see Mr. Taylor, a pioneer of organic farming in Quebec. Mr. Taylor was part of a generation of North American foodies and farmers rediscovering heirloom crops, which they prized for being more flavourful and natural. People were starting to discover “there’s more than a Honeycrisp apple, and a Bartlett pear, and a Cavendish banana,” he said.

The no-nonsense Mr. Taylor agreed to try growing the Montreal melon, but he soon came to regret it. There were many seeds in the packet sent from Iowa, and they produced all kinds of different melons, some small and orange, others large and green. He tried cross-breeding them to find a variety in line with historical descriptions of the original, but they were all a pain to cultivate, exquisitely sensitive to touch and hungry for heat.

By the late nineties, globalization had made melon a year-round staple, not a seasonal delicacy – and it’s hard to sustain luxury without scarcity. Maybe the Montreal Green Nutmeg needed the turn-of-the-century context to be considered on par with Champagne and caviar. Nothing is delicious in a vacuum, after all. Without its cachet, what is caviar anyway, said Mr. Taylor, but a bunch of “slimy eggs.”

The first renaissance of the Montreal melon was over almost before it started. Even successfully grown melons seemed a bit underwhelming to contemporary palates. After all that buildup, Mr. Lazar finally tasted one, and while he found it delicious – “sort of a cross between a cantaloupe and a honeydew” – it was hard to live up to a hundred years of hype.

“If you had a scoop of the Montreal melon,” he said, “you might not say, ‘Oh my god, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever had.’”

A friend of his made pickles with the rinds. They were pretty good.

One problem with the first revival was that no one was sure whether the seeds were really Montreal melons. The packet in Iowa had been gathered in the right city, but its label read “unverified melon.” Maybe that stash had come from a near cousin of the Green Nutmeg, a mediocre relative.

Since then, Mr. Taylor played with the genes at his farm and produced a plausible hybrid, but no one was tasting a carbon copy of the melon that people raved about in the year 1900. It was almost like trying to clone a mammoth from DNA found in some dry lakebed, only to get an ordinary elephant standing in your lab instead.

Interest in the Montreal melon died down for another 20 years. It bubbled up again recently for familiar reasons: foodies and writers couldn’t resist the strangeness and whimsy of the story.

Bernard Lavallée, a nutritionist, caught the bug a few years ago. Caught it so bad that he wrote a book: Le petit guide illustré du melon de Montréal. In 62 tightly written and charmingly illustrated pages, Mr. Lavallée tells the melon’s story and instructs amateurs how to grow it.

“It had a mythic air,” he said.

Published earlier this year, the book sold out its first print run of several hundred copies in a matter of days. Each copy came with a packet of seeds, so in theory, hundreds of Montreal melons may be growing in backyard patches and community gardens this summer.

The author attributes his surprise hit in part to Quebeckers’ sense of history. There’s something melancholy about the thousands of varieties of fruits and vegetables our ancestors ate “that disappeared without a trace,” Mr. Lavallée said. With the Montreal melon, it’s different. “It’s like you can eat a piece of the past.”

That nostalgic allure has attracted some vegetable farms as well, including Castlegarth in the Ottawa Valley and Hayfield in the Eastern Townships – run by the legendary Montreal restaurateur David McMillan – which have begun cultivating the melon.

As the mini-boom picked up velocity, Sébastien Hudon, the curator, went and found an actual piece of the past. It was January and he had just been hired as a curator at the Quebec Museum of Food and Agriculture (a translation of its French name) when he came across something beautiful.

It was a cabinet of seeds, 456 varieties of them, arranged like butterflies pinned to a board, with little buttonholes displaying a cluster of each type of seed. It was “vegetable art,” Mr. Hudon said, prepared by an agronomist named Maurice Couture in 1939 or 1940.

The cabinet had been on display at the museum in La Pocatière, Que., since the 1970s, but now Mr. Hudon noticed something new. One of the seed clusters was marked “Muscat de Montréal.” That was a common French name for the Montreal melon. He had heard the stories. Now, here he was, face to face with the thing itself: the ur-Montreal melon.

“After I found the seeds I fell into a frenzy to learn everything I could learn about them,” he recalled.

It didn’t take long to realize how precious his find was. There were only 12 or 13 seeds in the capsule, so he would have to proceed carefully. Failed viability tests on similar melon seeds found at the museum discouraged anyone from trying to plant the Montreal melon, but a researcher at Laval University in Quebec City is now sequencing its genetic material with a view to one day possibly cloning the fruit.

“We have absolutely no margin for error,” Mr. Hudon said. “We have to be absolutely sure that they will grow.”

This time, they might actually get a woolly mammoth.

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