Medlars make excellent jams and jellies. Those delicious preserves would perhaps be less popular if the original name for the medlar—open-arse—had not become obsolete in the nineteenth century. The fruit acquired that shocking name more than a thousand years ago, thanks to the fact that it has a deep depression at its top that looks like an anatomical cleft (not the one in your chin). When medlar arose in the fifteenth century as an alternative name for the fruit, it was unable to shake the bawdy associations of the earlier name, perhaps because medlar happens to sound like meddler, a word that had denoted a fornicator since the early fifteenth century. As a result, Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, has Mercutio make a dirty joke when he suggests that Romeo will “wish his mistress were that kind of fruit / As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.” The French, too, were apparently struck by the resemblance of the medlar to buttocks: they once called the fruit cul de chien, meaning dog’s ass.