Bletting

"After the period of ripeness", he wrote, "most fleshy fruits undergo a new kind of alteration; their flesh either rots or blets.

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."

[4] Chemically speaking, bletting brings about an increase in sugars and a decrease in the acids and tannins that make the unripe fruit astringent.

Ideally, the fruit should be harvested from the tree immediately following a hard frost, which starts the bletting process by breaking down cell walls and speeding softening.

In Notes on a Cellar-Book, the great English oenophile George Saintsbury called bletted medlars the "ideal fruit to accompany wine.