too. In Czechia, they are known as , in Poland as , in Hungary as , in Slovakia as , in Slovenia as , and in Portugal as . They are widely grown, typically for stewing in syrup to make a compote. In Portugal, however, they make up a delicacy invented by Dominican nuns in the 16th or 17th century (when confined to their convents) in the town of Elvas, where they are boiled in a sugary syrup several times, over the course of several weeks, to then be preserved whole in syrup or dried, coated in sugar and eaten either with a local dessert, sericaia, made from eggs, sugar, milk, cinnamon and flour or eaten with rich cheeses. At least the green cultivars breed more or less true from seed. Several similar cultivars produced from seedlings are now available; some of these include other plum cultivars in their parentage. Widely grown cultivars include: Boddarts Reneclode (Germany) Bryanston (UK) Cambridge Gage (UK) (Turkey) Denniston's Superb (USA) Gojeh Sabz (Iran) or Göy Alça (Azerbaijan) Golden Transparent (UK) Graf Althanns Reneklode (Germany) Green Vanilla (Mount Pelion, Greece) Große Grüne Reneklode (Germany) / Reine Claude Verte (France) Laxton's Gage (UK) Laxton's Supreme (UK) Meroldts Reneclode (Germany) Rainha Cláudia (Portugal) (Italy) Reine Claude de Bavay (France) Reine Claude d'Oullins (France) Uhinks Reneklode (Germany) Washington (USA) Culture The fruit has inspired a film, The Greengage Summer (called The Loss of Innocence in the USA) which is a 1961 British drama film set in France. It was based on the novel The Greengage Summer (1958) by Rumer Godden. One Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch involved a deranged self-defence instructor (played by John Cleese) whose main hypothetical enemy was fresh fruit. When trying to get him to focus on more menacing foes, his exasperated students began ticking off the fruits they had already bravely battled, including 'greengages, lemons, plums, and mangoes in syrup!' More recently, the tree features in the novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017) by Iranian-Australian author Shokoofeh Azar. References Plum cultigens