San Francisco Magazine
September 2009
I am not a melon lover, yet there is one summer melon that I crave: the Ha’ogen. I like its intoxicating scent, its depth of flavor, its sweetness that never seems cloying. And I like its story: It may have originated in Hungary, and it was certainly popularized by the Ha’ogen kibbutz in Israel in the 1960s (the name means “the anchor” in Hebrew). Its seeds made their way to California, and today it is one of the most delicious melons you can buy.
A type of green cantaloupe, the Ha’ogen (commonly pronounced hogan) has a orange rind ribbed with grass-colored stripes. When it’s ripe, its aroma is powerfully evocative, with notes of flowers, spices, and a distinctive gaminess that gives this family of melons its name: muskmelons.
Some of the best local Ha’ogens are grown by Hamada Farms, run by a third-generation Japanese American family on about 235 acres in the Kingsburg area. Started in 1921, Hamada Farms was at first strictly a commercial grower that packed and shipped its fruit. It grew high-yielding, durable varieties of citrus, stonefruit, grapes, figs, cucumbers, and melons and picked them underripe, in order for the fruit to withstand travel and storage time—it often took as long as a week until it landed on a grocer’s shelf.
For decades, the Hamadas threw away the best, most perfectly ripe fruit, but in the late 1980s, they decided to try something different: They began to take that fruit to the farmers’ markets that were starting to crop up in the region. Yukio Hamada, who runs the farm, had always experimented with different cultivars, but as the market business grew, he increasingly ventured into unusual varieties that were more delicate—or extraordinary only when ripened on the plant, like melons.
Unlike many fruits, such as pears and apples, melons don’t convert starch to sugar, so they stop ripening once they’re picked. Not only will an unripe melon lack sweetness, but it will also be without the aromatic complexity that makes melons so alluring.
Although there’s no surefire way to pick a good melon every time, yellowing around the stem end and a developed aroma are signs that the flavor may be at its peak. But melons are famously capricious, with one being perfect and the next barely edible. (If you think this is a recent phenomenon, consider a 1903 article in the New York Times that characterized the average melon of the day as “a hopeless degenerate.”) That said, I have found the Ha’ogens sold by Hamada to be consistently good.
A perfect melon is a complete food—you need only cut and serve, and some would argue that doing anything else only diminishes the fruit. But if you must transform the fruit, here are a few ideas. Melon sparkles in the company of mint, and cucumber (one of melon’s relatives) makes for an intriguing and congenial partner. Salt, whether from cured pork, like prosciutto, or from crunchy grains of sea salt sprinkled on top, balances the melon’s intense sweetness in an appetizer role. For dessert, melon sorbet—purée mixed with just a bit of water and sugar, then frozen—is the essence of late summer.
“In Hungary, what you call Ha’ogen is sarga dinye,” says Amaryll Schwertner, chef-owner of Boulette’s Larder, in the Ferry Building. Schwertner, who grew up in Budapest, confirms that she has witnessed melon being seasoned with snuff—I had read about this practice and considered the tale apocryphal. When she was a child, Schwertner ate melon with salty sheep’s milk cheese, seasoned with paprika or scented with rosewater and honey to accompany dry-cured lamb.
The melon soup recipe that Schwertner gave me, from her grandmother, is delightful—and delightfully simple. In addition to melon, it calls for sour cream and tokjai aszu, a Hungarian dessert wine that is not hard to find in local wine stores. The soup is sweet and aromatic, creamy and refreshing. If every dish tells a story, then this one has a happy ending.
