The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [32]
This grazing technique is unwieldy with the larger melons. For honeydews and most of your other summer fruit favorites, we must return to basics. Here are answers to the twenty most commonly asked questions about fruit and ripeness:
1. What is the difference between a fruit and a vegetable?
The answer has nothing to do with what kind of plant it came from, and everything to do with what part of the plant it was. A vegetable is a plant we raise for food. Anatomically, every vegetable is composed of roots, stems, stalks, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Yes, nearly every vegetable has a fruit. So asking whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable is as silly as asking whether that large gray wrinkled tube over there is a trunk or an elephant. A fruit is the ovary of a plant—the seeds and the tissue surrounding them. Not only is a tomato the fruit of the tomato plant, but a green or purple pepper, filled as it is with seeds, is the fruit of the pepper plant. And the same goes for green beans, eggplant, zucchini, avocado, and pea pods—all fruits we eat during the savory part of the meal. When a fruit is juicy and high in sugar, we tend to save it for dessert, and then we call it a fruit, even when it is anatomically a stem, like rhubarb.
Most edible plants have only one part we especially like—and for which the plant has been bred, some for 1,000 or more years. When we eat beets, turnips, carrots, celeriac, and salsify, we concentrate on the roots, underground storage depots for starch and sugar, though we also eat celery branches, and some of us eat beet greens. Zucchini and cucumbers are fruits; we may eat their flowers, stuffed or not, baked or fried, but never their roots or leaves. When we are in the mood for eating leaves, we turn to spinach, cabbage, lettuce, sorrel, and all the herbs. Asparagus is a stalk or shoot. Beans and peas in a pod are seeds; when they are immature and their pods or shells are green and edible, they are fruits. We eat pea shoots but not bean shoots. Most of us ignore the potato flower and the artichoke stem. Potatoes, we need no reminding, are not roots. They are tubers—the swollen, fleshy, starchy subterranean section of the stem between the roots and the outside world.
2. Then what is a fruit?
A fruit is an ovary we eat for dessert. Peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums, and cherries are pretty simple ovaries—one seed surrounded by luscious flesh (the enlarged ovary wall) and wrapped in vividly colored skin. Incidentally, a nectarine is not a cross between a peach and a plum but a fuzzless variety of peach with an ancient pedigree.
3. What about raspberries?
Raspberries are more complicated. They are not true berries like currants and grapes. Each little segment is an entire stone fruit all in itself; a raspberry is made up of many ovaries from the same flower joined together. The strawberry wears its ovaries on the outside.
4. Do you mean that a strawberry is a fig turned inside out?
Just so. And a pineapple is a collection of berries all fused together. Watermelons are placental tissue riddled with seeds, a discovery that has somehow made watermelon less appealing to me.
5. What is the number one poem ever written about plums?
Experts differ, but my favorite is “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
6. Isn’t ripening a chaotic, degenerative breakdown of the flesh and skin of a fruit as it plunges toward the death and decay that await us all?
Where did you get that idea? Ripening is a tightly structured, programmed series of changes that a fruit undergoes as it prepares to seduce every gastronomically aware animal in the neighborhood. Most fruit tastes best when it is ripest, which is often just when its seeds are ready