Fruit

The tag for dishes built on fruit generally — the stone fruits, berries, melons and dried fruits that appear across the atlas without any one of them defining the dish.

Where it comes from

Fruit reaches a kitchen in two quite different roles. Fresh, it is acid and perfume, and it is a dessert on its own. Dried, it is concentrated sugar that keeps for a year, and across Persian, North African, Central Asian and medieval European cooking it belongs in savoury dishes as much as sweet ones.

The savoury use is the older one. Meat cooked with apricots, prunes, dates or quince is standard from Morocco to Iran to Uzbekistan, and it was normal in Europe too until sugar became cheap and pushed fruit onto the pudding course.

Varieties

• Stone fruit — Peach, apricot, plum, cherry. Short seasons, and they cook far better than they keep.
• Berries — Strawberry, raspberry, currant, blueberry, cloudberry. High acid, fragile, mostly eaten raw or preserved fast.
• Dried fruit — Raisin, date, prune, dried apricot, fig. Sweetness plus body, and the backbone of savoury fruit cooking.
• Melons — Watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew. Almost entirely water and sugar.
• Tropical fruit — Mango, papaya, guava, passion fruit, pineapple, jackfruit. Aromatic, and several contain enzymes that break down protein.
• Quince — Inedible raw, transformed by long cooking to pink and perfumed. Membrillo, and Persian and Balkan stews.

In the kitchen

Fresh pineapple, papaya, kiwi and figs contain protease enzymes that digest protein. They will stop gelatine setting and turn a marinated meat to mush. Cooking destroys the enzymes; tinned pineapple is already heat-treated and is safe in a jelly.

Fruit added to a savoury braise early dissolves into the sauce and sweetens it; added late it stays as distinct pieces. Both are legitimate and the choice is worth making deliberately.

Dried fruit soaked in something — tea, wine, spirit, stock — before it goes into a dish stops it stealing liquid from everything else.

Fruit is tagged on 561 dishes from 181 countries in the atlas. These notes are written from general knowledge and carry no per-fact citation — see About.