Your zest friend

It may look a little dull compared with other fruit, but the zingy orange was once the preserve of kings and nothing beats its sweet and sharp magic when it comes to brightening up a dreary winter day, says Tom Parker Bowles

- By Tom Parker Bowles

The orange doesn't immediately strike one as the most sybaritic of fruits. Too brash, too bold, too, well, orange. It lacks the peach's luscious curves and the strawberry's plump, come-hither allure. Grapes can be dangled above lips of louche, lascivious lovers and cherries gorged with a frisky wink, but the orange is wilfully, resolutely unsexy, thick woollen tights rather than silken stockings, more half-time snack than good-time minx. Shakespeare, in Much Ado About Nothing, even goes as far as to associate it with the green-eyed monster. Count Claudio, described by Beatrice as 'neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well' is a 'civil count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion'.

Civil as an orange, eh? Hardly complimentary, although the Stratford scribe was referring with his pun to the bitterness of the Seville, Citrus aurantium, which would have been the only orange he'd known. Native to China, the fruit made its way, via Arab traders, into Sicily and Spain towards the end of the 12th century. And there's a typically picaresque account of how it travelled further north. A group of Norman pilgrims, so the tale goes, was meandering from Jerusalem and happened across a fierce battle, where the Prince of Salerno was under heavy attack from an army of marauding Moors. They flew to his aid, drove off the aggressors (no ordinary pilgrims, these!) and saved the Prince's life.