[Sca-cooks] fruit varieties for cooking

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>  Kirsten Houseknecht commented:
>>i would use sour cherries.  if you add sugar to something like a Bing
>>cherry you get sweet mush.
>Do you mean that the added sugar actually helps turn these cherries 
>to mush? Or do you mean that since you are going to mush these 
>anyway, you end up with a sweet mush vs. a sour one?
>
>>besides, sour was much more usual in cooking (still is)
>Hmmm. There are particular varieties of apples that are better for 
>cooking, and I believe pears as well. Do most fruits have varieties 
>that are widely agreed to be better for cooking?
>
>Unfortunately, I'm not sure these cooking varieties are easily 
>available, any more. Maybe I just don't recognise which varieties in 
>the fruit section of my grocery are specifially for or best for 
>cooking.

That's probably it. My guess would be that with the advent of things 
like the refrigerated truck or railroad car, more "eating" varieties 
of fruits became more available around the country and around the 
world, and that, while people would sometimes pick an apple off a 
tree and eat it, a lot more of the fruit we ate was cooked, compared 
to today. Starting (clutches at rough guess) in around the turn of 
the [20th] century, or maybe slightly before, we probably saw not the 
emergence of "cooking varieties" of fruits, but of an increased 
number of "eating" varieties, which have become distinct from cooking 
varieties. One problem, of course, is a certain blurring of 
distinctions, with things like Granny Smith apples being reasonably 
good for cooking and for eating raw, while simultaneously bumping off 
the market roster varieties like Romes, Ida Reds, Winesaps and 
Northern Spies.

Adamantius