[Sca-cooks] fruit varieties for cooking

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> >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,

Actually, the trouble seems to be that there are fewer varieties total of
fruits available around the country. It's a well documented fact that the
number of total varieties of most fruits is declining, and what is
available in the store is a miniscule portion of that, because large-scale
growers have focused on varieties that ship the best. Fruits are
especially vulnerable to this phenomenon because there are fewer home
fruit growers, and apples in particular have to be propagated from grafts,
not seeds.

Not only are fewer varieties available, fewer different fruits, both
cooking and eating, are available, in most places in the country.

There are a lot of books that talk about this, but one that's been
discussed here before is _The Botany of Desire_; I prefer _Uncommon Fruits
Worthy of Attention: A Gardener's Guide_ by Reich Lee, which is less
polemic.

>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.

No, actually. Garden and Horticulture experts decry the number of lost
varieties, some of them better for eating, some for cooking, since the
beginning of the twentieth century.

One of the more embarrassing faux pas of the late 19th century social
work movement in Boston was trying to get the Italian immigrants to eat
fewer fruits and veggies (which early home economics claimed had little
nutrient value, being mostly water) and eat more 'solid fare' such as
baked beans, cod, etc.

-- Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"For so many years gentle has been equated with weakness, but it requires
more strength to be gentle, so it's the everyday encounters of life that I
think we've prepared children for and prepared them to be good to other
people and to consider other people." -- Bob Keeshan (Capt. Kangaroo)