Roses named after women are a dime a dozen, but it seems that the honour of having a fruit named after you is more rare.
The loveliest example is our own spanspek, named after a woman, albeit by association.
In the rest of the world it’s called a cantaloupe melon, but here in SA the melon with the distinctly webbed skin and sweet, musky flavour is forever a spanspek in any language, and it comes with a story as romantic as any rose.
In the Peninsular War during the early 19th century, Spain, Portugal and Britain were allied in preventing Napoleon’s French forces from occupying the Iberian Peninsula. In 1812 British forces stormed the Spanish town of Badajoz. During the siege, two sisters of noble birth fled the town after their family’s home was destroyed, and asked the British for protection.
The younger sister, 14-year-old Juana Maria de los Dolores de León, had just left a convent — and one of the British officers, Captain Harry Smith, 23, who had been promoted to that rank just two months before, had met Juana and within just two weeks they were married and in due course he took her home to England.
In 1928 the now Major Smith was posted to the Cape Colony in SA where he served as governor of the province of Queen Adelaide in the Eastern Cape.
He was reportedly popular with both settlers and the Xhosa people, to whom he was apparently more benevolent than official policy dictated at the time.
But he and Juana soon moved on to the Indian subcontinent. After distinguished service there, Sir Harry, “just call me Harry”, returned to the Cape as governor in 1847.
The Smiths stayed at the Cape until 1852, and it was probably during this time that the servants in their Cape Town residence noted that Sir Harry, a typical Englishman, wanted bacon for breakfast, while Lady Juana stuck to her Spanish ways and preferred cantaloupe melon.
With familiar Cape humour, they called her melon Spanish bacon — spek, which was later shortened to spanspek.
Lady Juana is said to have wept when she finally had to leave SA, and always said that her years here were the happiest in her life.
Two towns were named after her, Ladysmith and Ladismith, and one, Harrismith after her husband. Those names may change in time, but the Lady’s spek will live on.
This story may not be totally true, as there are earlier records from the 1700s of the use of the word: in Suriname a melon was also called Spaanch-spek. Of course that name could have been picked up and reapplied with extra meaning in the Cape.
Granny Smith was also a real person — Maria Smith — before she became a world-famous apple.
Maria emigrated with her husband Thomas from Beckley in East Sussex to Australia in about 1838. Around 1855 they bought an orchard and farm in Eastwood, an area now absorbed into northern Sydney, and grew fruit.
After her husband died, Maria carried on farming alone.
As she came from a part of England with many apple farms, Maria probably knew what she was doing, and legend has it that she grew her unique apple from a chance seedling that she found growing in her compost heap after throwing away a crate of rotting French crab apples from Tasmania.
The apple is probably a cross between that wild European apple and another garden apple at the time.
She loved the “new” apple because it was perfect for both eating fresh and cooking, and sold them from a street market stall in Sydney. She died three years after discovering her apple, but by then other farmers were growing it, including Edward Gallard who later bought the farm. It was he who named it Granny Smith after her, but it only really became well-known by that name in the 1890s, later spreading around the world.
Smith was 68 when she died, but was known as “Granny” because she had so many grandchildren through her own eight children.
Granny Smith is the only apple really suitable for cooking, because of its tartness, that is commercially grown in SA.
Another fruit linked to a woman is the dark greeny/blue Hubbard squash. Yes, it’s a vegetable in the culinary sense, but like many other vegetables, it’s a fruit in botanical terms.
The squash, a South African favourite, originated in South America, and seeds were taken to Massachusetts in the US in 1798 by Captain Knott Martin, who gave them to a friend called Elizabeth Hubbard.
She grew them and enthused about their excellent qualities of sweet flavour, creamy texture, and storage potential for up to six months during winter — if picked when the skin is very hard. Hubbard in turn shared the seeds with James Gregory, who selectively bred the squash to enhance the blue tinge on the knobbly skin, and started selling them commercially and in the 1840s named them after her.
Hubbard was not the same person as the Elizabeth Hubbard whose allegations condemned so many in the Salem Witch Trials — she lived in Massachusetts a century earlier, nor is there a connection to Old Mother Hubbard in the English nursery rhyme, which is even older.
