Edging the window up an inch (a basement kitchen needs airing), the smell of roasting potatoes wafts in. Nearby, in other Edinburgh kitchens, cooks are preparing for Burns Night suppers. The immortal Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 and, in his honor, everywhere from the Northern Highlands to the Cheviot Hills, guests will arrive and there will be whisky on the table, a toast to the lassies, and clootie dumplings, cock-a-leekie, cranachan, crowdie, cullen skink, scotch broth, haggis (meaty, oaty, slightly spicy, slightly mythical), neeps and tatties. The national bard will, of course, be addressed with poetry, and the food blessed with the Selkirk Grace:
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Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
While Robert Burns never left Scotland, preferring to stay in ‘the Land o’ Cakes’ (oatcakes), swapping Bibles with his lovers on silvery rivers and composing ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, ‘To a Mouse’ and ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’, his relative Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes (1805–1841) traveled far beyond. Involved in the Great Game, the nineteenth-century clandestine struggle between tsarist Russia and the British Empire, he served in the army of the East India Company and while journeying to holy Bukhara as a secret agent, its glorious fruit was not wasted on him. He marveled at the “never-ending employment of the fruiterers in dealing out their grapes, melons, apricots…” And made a special note on Uzbek melons: “…every cultivated spot groaned under the gigantic melons of Bokhara; many of which were also being transported in caravans of camels to the city.” His memoir, Travels into Bokhara, chronicling Sind, Afghanistan and the khanates of Central Asia, became a bestseller before he was assassinated in Kabul, aged thirty-six.
The traders and farmers of Uzbekistan’s melons know, very well, the true value of these fruits; how the act of really caring for them can, in turn, make us more mindful.
Another Great Game traveller, Captain Frederick Burnaby (1842–1885), the British Army’s swashbuckling balloonist, who stood six foot four inches tall and was said to have once carried a pony under one arm, also travelled to Central Asia and fell under the spell of its melons. In his 1876 book A Ride to Khiva, he wrote: “The melons here have a fame which is celebrated all over the East. In former years, they were sent as far as Peking for the Emperor of China’s table.” Burnaby procured some seeds and tried, but ultimately failed, to grow them back in England.
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It is possible that these British Great Game travelers were attuned to the delights of melons because of the fascination for them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Melons can, with some help, grow successfully in the British Isles and not that long ago there was a real desire and passion to try and do so.
A great chronicler of this fad was Gilbert White, born in 1720 in the county of Hampshire. An English gardener-naturalist and Romantic scientist, he was a storyteller too, keeping detailed notes in his Garden Kalendar and Naturalist’s Journal. In the 1750s, White embarked on extensive experiments, growing recently introduced novelty melons in hotbeds under frames, with constant and gentle warmth generated by reeking horse manure. Meticulous in his documentation, he even noted the number of cartloads of decomposing dung donated by his neighbors: “March 13th 1755 ‘Made a very deep & large Hotbed for my melon-seeds; with seven cart loads of dung: thatch’d the edges of the bed without the frame.’”
The melons did eventually succeed, having weathered thunderstorms and floods, and during the summer of 1758 White allowed himself to relax, satisfied that his cantaloupes were “delicate, dry and firm.” By September, he was ready to show them off, gathering friends around him in a building he had named ‘The Hermitage,’ a little dwelling in the English countryside, for a celebratory melon feast. Gardeners today who look after White’s estate, now open to the public, have carried on the tradition, growing two melon cultivars: ‘Black Rock’ and ‘Petit Gris de Rennes.’
Further north, in Scotland, with its cool and wet climate, maintaining melon beds was extremely expensive, but with the introduction of hotbeds in the eighteenth century, local melons had become a possibility for fancier dinner tables. Prized as they may have been, well-to-do families could only eat so much fresh melon, therefore a need for preserving arose. Margaret Malcolm, a keen cook who lived two hours south of Edinburgh, in Langholm, kept a recipe book in 1782. In it, she recorded a recipe from a friend, Mrs. Carnegie, for preserving melon. The fruit is “boiled up” with ginger in sugar and then scented with lemon peel. Mrs. Carnegie also suggested storage advice: “To taste well of the ginger this sweetmeat should not be used for six to eight months, and will keep for years.”
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Cubing more melon, enclosed in the task, I can see that while the flesh is not yet mushy or hollow it will need eating promptly. Time is what matters most in a kitchen. Fruit and vegetables, bought as proof of the day, perspire, before cankering and full-on rotting. Plants and potted herbs dry out and wither. Lemons decay, their sunny puckered skins turning to greenhued dust. Milk takes on a grey-ish sheen, good only for pouring down the sink. A kitchen, just like a garden, grove or melon bed, demands attention. Outside, the street is now completely deserted. Bad weather, getting worse, rain sheeting down. And as I finish constructing my salad of watermelon, feta and mint, I can feel Darwin’s eyes scrutinizing my back; his keen and expert nose has alerted him to the salty piece of bone-white cheese that I am crumbling and crushing with my fingers over a bowl. Even above carrots, it is cheese he likes best.
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Uzbekistan’s traders have many time-honored ways of storing their cherished melons. Nearly all winter varieties spend time in a dark, cool, specially built shed called a qovunxona. Inside, strapped to the rafters with thick string or netting, they ripen in slow motion over the cold months, amassing maximum sucrose and becoming ever more melony. Matured that way, they can keep for up to eight months, making them available for most of the year and suitable to travel overland across vast deserts and steppes. To provide natural ventilation, the walls of a qovunxona are studded with saucer-sized porthole windows. A melon shed should be filled with clean, cool air, not the smell of melons. If their scent is present, they are already starting to turn. Before qovunxonas existed, farmers would shovel up snow or sand and bury their melons deep underground, where they would be insulated from the chill.
Whether rare or common, local or imported, Spanish or Uzbek, every melon is a kind of miracle in itself.
While qovunxonas may sound peculiar, they are not very different to the root cellars of seventeenth-century England: cool, sheltered undercrofts built for the storage of fruit and vegetables, which fell out of favor when electricity, refrigerators and urban living grew in popularity. Back then, the English seedsman Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) wrote of the fine delicacies and described the commitment required for the British melon grower, advising in his Practical Kitchen Gardiner that the gardener “not fail to visit the melonry at least three times a day, morning, noon and evening.”
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The traders and farmers of Uzbekistan’s melons know, very well, the true value of these fruits; how the act of really caring for them can, in turn, make us more mindful. Their reverence is evident in the names the melons are given—’white feather,’ ‘wolf head,’ ‘golden eyebrow’ and ‘black lake,’ among others—and the sense of pageantry with which they are displayed.
In contrast to our Western tendency to import most fruit and expect year-round availability, the right fruit, eaten at the right time, in the right place, is incomparable. As Christopher Lloyd, the gardener-chronicler of Great Dixter, wrote in his book Gardener Cook, “The difference in flavour between a fruit culled at exactly the right moment from your own tree and one picked weeks before becoming ripe for the sake of marketing has to be experienced to be believed.”
You do not have to have your own fruit trees, so few of us do, but lost wonderment can be reignited in a single afternoon spent at a ‘pick your own’ field, or by sorting through brambles in search of blackberries. Or simply by slowing down in the kitchen, often a place of ceaseless activity, and thinking, really thinking, about the fruit in the bowl. Each encounter with an ingredient in the kitchen offers the chance to drift to lands elsewhere, or to reconnect with the past. Take fruit puddings, so long-lived and multigenerational that they cannot help but be full of memories: the plum pudding at Christmas, the summery peach trifle. When the mood takes me, and I find myself almost delirious with the vivid want of Uzbekistan’s paradisiacal melons, I turn to any variety—and, by bringing it into the kitchen to eat, I can recapture again, with renewed wonderment, the exquisite experience of buying and eating them far from home.
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After the storm, I sit to eat my salad, a dance of salty, sweet and cool. Crisp but also surprisingly warming, partly from the mint and partly from the reverie. And I am grateful to be here in this kitchen, both a respite from the world and equally a way back into it.
Mark Twain described watermelon as “chief of the world’s luxuries…when one has tasted it, he knows what angels eat.” And while I would not stretch to such a soliloquy for this particular melon, it doesn’t matter because, whether rare or common, local or imported, Spanish or Uzbek, every melon is a kind of miracle in itself. This flesh-fragrant melon has more than served its purpose by unlocking the gates back to Uzbekistan, bringing forth good memories that, like provisions, have been tidied away, to be brought out at will from the store cupboard of the mind, proving that the real feast is within.
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Excerpted from Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels by Caroline Eden. Copyright © 2025 by Caroline Eden. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.
