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Food and Drink

One good thing added to another

We have Gorillaz, the amazing virtual band that hybridizes great animation and pop culture narratives with great music, siphoning from pop, alt rock, dub and hip hop veins, to name a few.

We have cars and SUVs that are hybrids, running on gasoline and batteries; plug-in electricity, gas and batteries; fuel cells and batteries. And we have vehicles that are crosses of cars and SUVs themselves.

We have part-mechanical and part-human hyper cyborgs in fiction and real life, and humanoid robots, or are those robotic humans? The latest, the geminoid DK out of Denmark, is so realistic it's tough to pick one out in a crowd.

We have all kinds of hybridized plants and crops, bred to resist all kinds of plagues, including herbicides like Monsanto's Roundup. There's hybrid corn, hybrid wheat and hybrid tomatoes that resist heat, drought and viruses, as well as one variety that even resists frost, thanks to what might be called the ultimate plant hybridization, which has turned it into a kind of horror-movie poster child for the non-GMO movement: gene-splicing with a white flounder native to the Arctic.

With the busy minds and hands of humanity forever at work, it seems we live in an eternally hybridizing and homogenizing world, some of the results more successful than others, especially when it comes to food.

Citrus plants are near the top of the hybrid list, mainly because citrus seldom grows true from seed (meaning it's the same as the mother plant). So horticulturalists are forever grafting this specimen to that, coming up with some interesting, delicious, even classic results.

The citrus parent species only numbers three, says food expert Harold McGee: citron, mandarin/tangerine, and pummelo, the big yellow fruit you often see in Asian food markets that looks like a giant grapefruit. As for the citrus offspring, they range from sweet oranges, the offshoots of pummelo crossed most likely with mandarin; to grapefruit, the cross of sweet oranges and pummelo; lemons, from crossing citron with sour lime and pummelo; and tangelos, from tangerines and grapefruit.

One of my all-time favourites has to be the bergamot orange, primarily known to most of us, in North America at least, as the wonderfully fragrant flavouring in Earl Grey tea.

Bergamot oranges - not to be confused with the mint-family herb known as bergamot, also called bee balm or Oswego tea - come from a hybrid citrus native to Calabria in southern Italy. The first bergamot orange tree likely resulted from crossing the sweet lime (confusingly, also know as sweet lemon) and the sour or bitter orange, also called Seville oranges, used in Seville marmalade, of course, as well as orange water.

More than three-quarters of all commercial bergamot oranges still come from there today, but they're also grown less widely in southern France and Ivory Coast. It likely has much to do with the fact that the climate in Calabria is perfectly suited, and the essential oil from there is higher in quality.

Like so many citrus fruits, don't try to eat a bergamot orange. It looks innocent enough growing on the tree, nestled amongst the shiny, dark green leaves like a big, somewhat misshapen green-to-yellow lemon or lime, rounder, though, and the size of an orange. If you bite into one, however, you'll spit it right out, it's so bitter and pungent.

But what makes for such strong distaste in a mouthful, accounts for a beautiful accord with a hint of the essential oil. The flavour notes? Citrus, pine, herbaceous, flowery and spicy, according to McGee - all on the terpene/terpenoid side, which account for all five flavour notes.

Terpenes make up a huge range of organic compounds produced by a host of plants, notably conifers, and some insects; terpenoids are related. Together they form a big part of many essential oils and other flavourings. Even the aroma and flavour in beer that we attribute to hops come from terpenes, as in "turpentine." Try that little factoid on your friends next time you're in the bar.

It must have been stroke of genius that first inspired the Chinese to blend bergamot oil with black tea. But it took an Englishman to bring it to the teapots and cups of the rest of the world.

According to Martha Barnette in her lighthearted book, Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies , much as John Montagu, the fourth earl of Sandwich, lent his name to the classic snack, another English nobleman, Earl Charles Grey, is responsible for the name of another classic, Earl Grey tea.

In the 1830s, Earl Grey lent his name to this unique tea after receiving the recipe as gift from a Chinese government official whose life had been saved by a British diplomat. Earl Grey's real claim to historical fame should have been his role in helping to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. But given the power of food and popular culture, it's a refreshing tea he's known for instead.

Bergamot oil was so novel and intriguing in 17th century Europe, it was also used as one of the elements in the original eau de cologne that was first developed in Germany. Snus, or Swedish snuff, used in Norway and Sweden is also flavoured with bergamot oil; and sometimes the peel can be candied.

In its traditional home of Calabria, bergamot orange oil has long been used in a number of medicinal applications, including as a herbal remedy for malaria. Using it directly on the skin, cautions Wikipedia, can increase skin redness that results from exposure to UV light. And one of the chemicals found in the oil - bergapten - can act as a potassium blocker.

In one case study, a patient who drank four litres of Earl Grey tea a day suffered muscle cramps - but come on, that's pretty crazy, even for an Earl Grey lover like myself. Still, I'll have to tell my husband, who's lately been drinking a particularly fragrant version of Earl Grey tea from Iran, and woke up in the middle of the night with a charley horse.

If you love the distinctive bergamot flavour of Earl Grey, but would like to try it in a different form, the city of Nancy, about a four-hour drive east of Paris, is known for its handmade bergamot-flavoured hard candies ( bergamotes de Nancy ), essentially boiled sugar and bergamot orange flavouring - nothing more.

That's the thing about a good hybrid classic. It stands on its own, and the test of time, with little or nothing else added.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who pours cold water over used Earl Grey tea leaves to make a refreshing drink.