Montreal melon, once thought to be all but gone, makes long-awaited comeback

globalnews.ca:

Montreal melon used to be the talk of the town over a century ago, with a high price tag for those lucky enough to afford one — or even a slice. Now, a local community group is hoping to bring back a little sliver of history and tastiness to the city.“It was sold for one or two dollars a slice,” Justine Senechal, the project lead at the Blue Bonnets Gardens, said in a recent interview.“Which to today’s equivalent is something like 35 bucks a slice, which is insane when we think about it, so it was very much a luxury food.”The Montreal melon was grown along the St.

Lawrence River in the 1800s, including in the fertile farmlands of the city. The harvest wasn’t just loved by locals: aristocrats in New York, Boston and Philadelphia also couldn’t get enough.Why was the melon so popular at the time? There isn’t a clear-cut answer, but Senechal said “a lot of people made a very good living of growing it over here.”But as farmlands gave way for industrial development, buildings and roads, non-profit organization Community Cafeteria MultiCaf says the once-coveted fruit all but disappeared by the 1920s.“Essentially it stopped being produced and the seeds were then lost because there was no more production of it,” Senechal said.In 1996, some seeds of the Montreal melon were discovered in an Iowa seed bank after some intrepid research by a journalist with the Montreal Gazette.Since then, efforts to bring back the melon have been multiplying — with the Blue Bonnets Gardens at the helm of the most recent push.