Tag Archives: fruit

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 →

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 →

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 →