Bletting
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Bletting is a process of softening that certain fleshy fruits undergo, beyond ripening.
There are some fruits that are either sweeter after some bletting, such as sea buckthorn, or for which most varieties can be eaten raw only after bletting, such as medlars, persimmons, quince, service tree fruit, and wild service tree fruit (popularly known as chequers). The rowan or mountain ash fruit must be bletted and cooked to be edible, to break down the toxic parasorbic acid (hexenollactone) into sorbic acid.[clarification needed]
The English verb to blet was coined by John Lindley, in his Introduction to Botany (1835). He derived it from the French poire blette meaning 'overripe pear'. "After the period of ripeness", he wrote, "most fleshy fruits undergo a new kind of alteration; their flesh either rots or blets."[1]
In "The Prologe of the Reeves Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century Tales of Caunterbury (lines 3871–3873) the Reeve complains about being old: "But if I fare as dooth an open-ers -- / That ilke fruyt is ever lenger the wers, / Til it be roten in mullok or in stree." [Unless I fare as does the fruit of the medlar -- / That same fruit continually grows worse, / Until it is rotten in rubbish or in straw[2]]. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, he alluded to bletting when he wrote (IV. iii. 167) "They would have married me to the rotten Medler." Thomas Dekker also draws a similar comparison in his play The Honest Whore: "I scarce know her, for the beauty of her cheek hath, like the moon, suffered strange eclipses since I beheld it: women are like medlars – no sooner ripe but rotten." Elsewhere in literature, D. H. Lawrence dubbed medlars "wineskins of brown morbidity."[3]
There is also an old saying, used in Don Quixote, that "time and straw make medlars ripe", referring to the bletting process.[4]
