The pomegranate is one of the oldest of all the cultivated fruits, taken into the orchard at the very dawn of horticulture alongside the grape, the fig, the olive, and the date. It is a single species, Punica granatum, and unlike the plum or the cherry it was not domesticated twice at opposite ends of the world; its homeland is the dry, mountainous belt that runs from the Iranian plateau and Transcaucasia through Central Asia to the foothills of the western Himalaya, and from that one cradle every cultivated pomegranate descends. The fruit is a botanical curiosity, neither a true berry of the common kind nor a stone fruit, but a balausta: a leathery-skinned globe, crowned with the persistent calyx that gave the medieval crown its shape, and packed within with hundreds of seeds, each sheathed in a translucent jewel of juice-laden flesh called the aril. It is the aril, not the bitter pith or the papery membranes that divide the chambers, that is eaten, and the great labour of the pomegranate has always been the freeing of those jewelled seeds from the fruit that holds them.

Like the almond, the pomegranate is one species with a decisive internal division, though here the division is not of poison and safety but of sweetness and sourness. The cultivated pomegranate falls into two broad families, and both are used substantially in the kitchen to this day. The sweet dessert pomegranates, low in acid and high in sugar, are the fruit of the hand and the juice press, eaten fresh and pressed for their ruby juice; the legendary sweet anar of Kandahar and the modern Wonderful variety belong here. The sour or sour-sweet pomegranates, sharp with acid, are the fruit of the pot: too tart to enjoy raw, they are pressed and their juice boiled down to the thick, dark, intensely tangy syrup that the Levant calls dibs rumman, Turkey nar ekşisi, and the Caucasus narsharab, the pomegranate molasses that is one of the great souring agents of the Near Eastern kitchen. Centuries of selection have multiplied each family into hundreds of named local varieties, from the soft-seeded dessert pomegranates of Iran to the hard-seeded sour fruit of the Anatolian and Caucasian molasses orchards, yet all are forms of the one ancient tree.

The pomegranate is a small, hardy, deciduous tree or many-stemmed shrub, thorny and long-lived, that thrives where the summers are long and hot and the winters cool, and that tolerates drought and saline soil better than almost any other fruit tree. It bears brilliant orange-scarlet flowers, the source of a fast red dye, and its leathery fruit keeps for months in a cool store, qualities that made it, in the ancient world, both a fruit of the living larder and a fruit fit for the tomb, carried into the next life as a promise of plenty and rebirth.

From its Iranian cradle the pomegranate spread early and in every direction, for it was prized at once for its keeping fruit, its jewelled seeds, its medicine, and its heavy freight of symbol. Westward it travelled into Mesopotamia, where it grew in the gardens of Sumer and Babylon and was carved on the columns of palace and temple; into the Levant, where it became one of the Seven Species of the land of Israel and where its image, in bronze and in blue and scarlet thread, adorned the pillars of Solomon's Temple and the hem of the high priest's robe; and into Egypt, where it was grown in the gardens of the New Kingdom, pressed into a tart wine, and laid in the tombs of the pharaohs. It was the seafaring Phoenicians of the Levantine coast who carried the tree the length of the Mediterranean, to Carthage and on to Greece and Italy, so that the Romans, receiving it through the Carthaginians, named it the malum punicum, the 'Punic apple', and later the malum granatum, the 'seeded apple', the name from which half of Europe's words for the fruit descend. The Greeks wove it into their darkest and most beautiful myth, the seeds of the underworld that bound Persephone to Hades and gave the world its winter; and across the whole ancient Near East and Mediterranean the pomegranate became the universal emblem of fertility, abundance, and the life that returns.

The second great age of the pomegranate's spread was the medieval Islamic one. The Arabs, who held the fruit in the highest esteem (it is praised by name in the Qur'an as a fruit of paradise), carried it and the art of its cultivation west along the whole arc of their conquests, through North Africa and across the Strait of Gibraltar into Iberia, where it found in the warm soils of Andalucía a second homeland so perfect that the last Moorish kingdom, and the city at its heart, took the fruit's very name: Granada, the pomegranate, whose arms still bear the split red fruit and whose emblem passed, after the Reconquista, into the royal arms of Spain itself. Eastward the Persianate world carried the pomegranate, the anar, into the high cuisine of Mughal India, where the sweet fruit of Kandahar was prized above all others and the dried sour seeds, anardana, became a souring spice of the northern kitchen. And from Spain the pomegranate crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadors and the missionaries, planted in the gardens of New Spain, where its scarlet seeds would one day crown the most patriotic dish of independent Mexico, and carried on by the Franciscans to the mission gardens of California, the dry, hot valleys that have become, in our own century, the centre of the modern pomegranate trade.

The pomegranate has lived two modern lives at once: the ancient fruit of the Near Eastern table, where it never lost its place, and the reinvented 'superfruit' of the twenty-first-century West. Across Iran, the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Levant, and the Indian north it remains exactly what it has always been: the fresh fruit eaten in autumn, the ruby juice pressed from a barrow on the street, and above all the dark, tart molasses that sours and deepens a thousand savoury dishes, from the Persian fesenjan to the Turkish kısır, the Syrian muhammara, the Georgian walnut sauces, and the Azerbaijani narsharab brushed over grilled sturgeon. Iran and India are the largest growers, and the fruit runs through the whole life of those countries, eaten, juiced, dried as anardana, and scattered, jewel-bright, over salads, dips, rice, and yoghurt as the universal garnish of the region.

In the West the pomegranate was, for most of the twentieth century, a rare and faintly exotic fruit, admired for its beauty and avoided for the labour of seeding it. That changed at the turn of this century, when the California growers of the Wonderful variety, the largest of them turning the fruit into a bottled juice sold on the strength of its antioxidant chemistry, made the pomegranate one of the defining health foods of the age; pomegranate juice, pomegranate seeds sold ready-freed in tubs, and pomegranate molasses borrowed from the Levantine pantry all entered the Western supermarket and the restaurant kitchen within a single decade. The fruit that the Greeks made the food of the dead and the Arabs the fruit of paradise is now smashed for luck at the Greek New Year, brushed over the Persian wedding table, glazed onto the Western roast, and pressed into a juice drunk for its health from Los Angeles to London, the same jewelled fruit, carrying the same freight of fertility and renewal, that was one of the very first the orchard ever held.