Melon

If You Read Nothing Else

Melon is roughly 90% water, so it rehydrates while it feeds.

A cup carries around 400 mg of potassium, more than most fruits.

Persian custom eats melon alone, before a meal rather than after it.

Kharbozeh isn't one fruit but a family of them, and the Persian ones are long, ridged and so fragrant that a cut melon scents a whole room. Khorasan and Samarkand built reputations on them. Travellers along the Silk Road wrote home about melon stalls the way they wrote about mosques. The fruit is around 90% water carrying potassium and sugar, which is precisely what a body sweating through a Persian afternoon has lost.

Known to botanists as Cucumis melo.