Category Archives: Fruit

Making ratatouille like a botanist

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The story of the nightshades is usually told as a tale of European explorers, New World agriculturalists, and a wary bunch of Old World eaters.  But what about the birds?  And the goji berries?  Jeanne and Katherine introduce you to the Solanaceae family and walk you through the botany to be observed while making ratatouille, the classic French collision of Eastern and Western nightshades.

Can you imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes? The Irish without potatoes? Chinese cuisine without spicy, fruity chiles?  Such was the case prior to the discovery of the New World nightshades (family Solanaceae) by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers.  And they couldn’t help but run into them.  Solanaceae is a huge family, with over 100 genera and nearly 2500 species, most of which are in Central and South America. Continue reading →

Pear grit and the art of aging

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Nostalgia emanates from a basket of pears, inspiring Katherine to explain what makes up these glorious, gritty, and gorgeous late-summer fruits.

Last week a dear friend conjured an entire autumn for me when she handed me one of her pears.  She had picked it a few days prior from one of the small espaliered trees that guard the outside of her bedroom wall and overlook her garden.  It was pale buttery gold with a pink blush, soft and honey-flavored.  A month past the solstice, we were still able to enjoy the low sun well into early evening as we sat on her deck and gazed over the garden, savoring the fruit.Rosaceae talking pear

Bartlett pears, like my friend’s, ripen in the summer and yet they herald the fall.  They appear, and we start the inevitable tumble towards apples, wool socks, and the bittersweet baseball postseason.  Other popular varieties, such as Bosc and d’Anjou, tend to arrive later, when we have already come to terms with shorter cooler days.

I love apples, but they are not as emotion-laden for me.  Whereas apples seem timeless, even summer pears carry an old fashioned patina.  They evoke a time when canning was a skill necessitated by the Depression, but which still made a lot of good sense.  My grandmother must have spent a thousand hours canning the soft sweet pears from her trees.

Pears also know how to age right.  Apples are harvested ripe from the tree, but pears should be taken when they have reached their full size and before they are ripe.  My friend always picks her pears before the squirrels can mark them with bite-sized divots, a practice that also happens to keep them from becoming mealy on the tree.  She sent me home that day with a bag of firm green Bartletts and instructions to hold them in a bag in my kitchen for a couple of days.  Summer varieties don’t require chilling, but d’Anjou and Comice pears benefit from a month of nearly freezing temperatures, followed by ripening at room temperature (Stebbins et al).  The proper aging of pears is all about managing the activity of enzymes that alter various compounds and break down cell walls.  Such treatment would ruin high-maintenance peaches, which are horrified by the thought of getting old and don’t take well to chilling. Continue reading →

Aching for strawberries

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If you have ever doubted the practical side of  plant anatomy, keep reading, as Katherine explains what you can learn about flowers by cutting up a strawberry.  As it turns out, this enigmatic little gem is packed with coincidences and apocrypha along with its citric acid and anthocyanins.  Could it turn out to be true that a strawberry is a berry after all?

Welcome to early June, when strawberry season is finally well underway across the US, as far north as the upper Midwest and New England.  Here in the promised land where little green plastic baskets are never empty (coastal northern California), there is still a peak season for strawberries, since the popular varieties don’t reach their full potential until mid-May.

With so many strawberries in so many kitchens this month, now is the perfect time to merge botany lab and breakfast preparation by working through the many parts of a strawberry.  Once you have mastered berry dissection, I promise you will find it a surprisingly versatile skill.  Having the confidence to steer a conversation towards strawberry anatomy can help you recover from one of the more awkward inevitabilities of summer – biting gracelessly through an enormous chocolate-covered strawberry just as you are introduced to the mother of the bride.  After you have pointed out the veins and ovaries and have explained the developmental origin of the epicalyx, she won’t remember the red juice and bits of chocolate shell you have just dribbled down your frontside.  Or so has been my experience. Continue reading →

Cucurbita squash diversity

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Jeanne introduces the diversity of some American natives, the squashes in the genus Cucurbita.

Spring is officially here, and I have squash on my mind.  We’ve ordered zucchini seeds for the upcoming summer garden but still have acorn squash from the fall sitting in the pantry (both are varieties of Cucurbita pepo). Our winter vegetable CSA box recently bequeathed to us the tastiest winter squash I’ve ever eaten, a Seminole pumpkin, which is a different variety of the same species (Cucurbita moschata) as the butternut squash sitting on the counter, destined for dinner.  Now between last year’s hard winter squashes and the tender summer squashes to come seems a good time to remind ourselves of the origins and diversity of squashes in the genus Cucurbita. Continue reading →

Pomegranates and the art of herbivore attraction

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Jeanne walks you through the botany you need to know to understand pomegranate fruit structure.  Jeanne’s definition of “need to know” is arguably a bit broad and includes a brief tour of the many different structures plants modify in order to entice herbivores, and at least one goddess, to disperse seeds. 

pomegranate fruit (persistent calyx and stamens visible)

pomegranate fruit (persistent calyx and stamens visible)

Pomegranates (Punica granatum, family Lythraceae, rosid order Myrtales) were one of the earliest domesticated plant species.  According to ancient Greek mythology, they even predate the seasons.  The story goes that Hades, god of the underworld, kidnapped his beloved Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest.  Demeter’s grief over Persephone’s disappearance caused the crops to wither and wreaked havoc with humanity.  The plight of the starving masses coerced Zeus to convince Hades to return Persephone to her mother.  Before she left the underworld, however, Hades tricked her into eating a pomegranate seed, which bound her to evermore spend part of the year with her happy mother, during which time plants flourished, and part of the year in the underworld, during which time plants go fallow. Thus, seasons arose.

Pomegranate seeds

Pomegranate seeds

We can hardly blame poor Persephone for finding pomegranate seeds irresistible.  They look like faceted jewels and have a refreshing, tangy sweetness and a satisfying crunch. We have an additional reason to be drawn to pomegranates: even if they can’t help us understand the seasons, deciphering the structures of the beautiful pomegranate fruit helps us understand the diversity of mechanisms plants use to entice animals, including humans, to disperse seeds.  The delicious, nutritious or fibrous attractive structure is payment for the animal’s labor. As you will see in this post, there is no single anatomical recipe for creating the colorful, fleshy and/or juicy reward for a seed-dispersing herbivore, mortal or otherwise.  Many of the myriad flower, fruit and seed structures are variously promoted to the role of what is colloquially thought of as “fruit.” Continue reading →

The holidays mean persimmons

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Hachiya persimmons, ripening

Hachiya persimmons, ripening

Jeanne discusses the biology behind the strange winter beauty of persimmon trees and demystifies why eating one before its time is an unpleasant experience.

The holiday seasons of my adult life increasingly include persimmons.  The ‘hachiya’ persimmons on my mother-in-law’s tree in California ripen around Christmas, beginning a conversation about what to do with them, and when they start showing up in the grocery store in late fall, I’m invariably drawn to the plump orange fruits with their handsome green calyxes.  I’ve now learned that persimmons, especially dried, are an important part of many new year celebrations throughout Asia, where there are thousands of persimmon varieties, but I only became acquainted with them when I moved from Denver to go to college in the Bay Area, where some of the Asian varieties are grown.  The bright orange plum-to-apple-sized persimmon fruits stay on the tree until well after the leaves drop in the autumn.  I paid little attention to the persimmon trees on campus—tall specimens of the ‘hachiya’ variety of Asian Diospyros kaki—until the leaves fell to reveal the scraggly branches laden with the orange orbs. Continue reading →

Have a salad and relax: the Dipsacales trio

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The three edibles from the order Dipsacales (mâche, elderberry and valerian) inadvertently make their way into Jeanne’s evening.

As I added some dried valerian (Valeriana officinalis) root to my bedtime tea mixture, I realized that in doing so I had inadvertently incorporated the only three common edibles from the order Dipsacales into my evening:  elder, mâche, and valerian.  These three make the Dipsacales a lonely but interesting and delicious branch of the asterid group of eudicots (see our phylogeny page for phylogenetic contextualization of the asterids):

Orders in the asterids, Dipsacales in red

Orders with edibles in the asterids, Dipsacales in red

Continue reading →

Varieties of the pepper experience

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Chili, black pepper, white pepper, and Sichuan pepper

Black pepper, pink peppercorns, chili pepper, Sichuan pepper – except for being “hot,” these spices have as little in common as Sergeant Pepper and Pepper Potts.  Their homelands are scattered across the world, and they were spread through distinct trade routes.  They are not closely related; they belong to families about as far apart as possible on the phylogenetic tree below.  They even aim their heat at different sensory receptors in your mouth. Continue reading →

Yellow freestone peaches, one with a bit of anthocyanin in its flesh

The Stone fruits of summer

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The scent of ripening peaches spurs Katherine’s musings on the botany
of stone fruits

Fragrant peaches ripening on window sills and countertops pull me right back into the heart of my childhood summers.  They always arrived in a huge box from Georgia, sent by my grandmother in the hope of drawing my parents back to their native state. Her other lures included Vidalia onions in April and Claxton fruitcakes in November, but peaches were definitely her best shot. The peaches were gorgeous, and their ripe flavor was incredibly complex and vivid, but their peak was ephemeral.  After my sister and I had spread them all out on newspapers, the whole sprawling array had to be checked at least two times a day and sorted by ripeness. Peaches were never allowed to touch each other.  On some hot days, peach tending took on the urgency of triage, with fruits passing from ripe to “sharp” to downright alcoholic in one long afternoon.

Peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, and cherries are sometimes called stone fruits because of their pits, or stones.  Along with almonds, they are all in the genus Prunus which belongs to the Rose family – Rosaceae.  Several other familiar fruits come from the rose family but are not stone fruits. Continue reading →

Do peaches belong in the fridge?

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Some people just cannot bring themselves to refrigerate peaches. Storing peaches lovingly at room temperature is said to coax out the best in peach scent, flavor, and texture. But treating peaches this way does take a lot of time and vigilance, as I detail elsewhere. Reliable authorities – peach packing houses and state extension agencies – recommend refrigerating peaches once they become ripe, but some people would rather risk losing fruit to rot than let them get cold. But does it matter? Can peaches be stored in the fridge to slow their decline without compromising their peak? Continue reading →