If You Read Nothing Else

One cup covers a full day of vitamin A, from beta-carotene in the orange flesh.

It's about 90% water, so it hydrates while you eat it.

Smell the stem end. A ripe tālebi announces itself. An unripe one smells of nothing.

Melons have been a Persian speciality for a thousand years. Ibn Sīnā gave kharbozeh a section of its own in the Canon, and Silk Road travellers wrote home about the melon stalls of Samarkand and Khorasan. Tālebi is the small, orange-fleshed melon that fills Tehran markets from Khordad onward. You can smell a ripe one across the room. It's mostly water, and its deep orange colour comes from the pigment your body turns into vitamin A.

Known to botanists as Cucumis melo var. cantalupensis.