I’m not much of a gambler, never bought a lottery ticket, you won’t find me in with the VLTs in Gus’. But this time of year we do buy boxes of clementines which feels like a crap shoot. Will the bottom layer be soft and fuzzy? Will the fruit be tasteless or dried out? Clementines are excellent or acceptable just often enough to keep us coming back, but prepared to be fooled again.
The box that came home yesterday (a few soft spots but good flavour) was Spanish with a cute brand name: Darling Clementines. I noted the shiny paper label because several years ago I had saved the end of a box where the label was printed directly on the wood (like our old salt cod boxes). Another sweet little traditional detail passes.
The new paper label is on top and the old printed wood is on the bottom.
This got me thinking about some paper fruit wrappers I’ve saved. Most are 30 years old or more but if I saw a nice one today I would put it in my shopping cart. These are the tissue paper squares wrapped around fruit to protect it in transit and to identify the point of origin and producer. Now that many fruit have PLU stickers, the wrappers are rarely seen. I suspect that Pete’s would be a place to look if you want to acquire a few.
I wrapped a couple of clementines in Moroccan wrappers to provide you with a search image.
I saved these bits of paper because they were free, often had attractive designs and it made shopping more interesting. Here are some colourful wrappers for Italian lemons.
And for Spanish oranges.
There’s a little hieroglyph on these Egyptian citrus wrappers.
Notice there is usually a central round element to the designs and rays or lines radiating out from that centre. These American wrappers are for pears and tomatoes.
Bambi is Spanish and the lemon boy is Sicilian.
What do you think? That’s not so weird is it? The cosplay at HAL-CON, that’s weird.