All too soon, the produce aisles will be full of apples and pears, and while they will get me through the winter – for a few more weeks, I am bingeing on summer fruit – diverse, juicy, and sweet.

Fruit is also the most provocative food group. The apple was alluring enough to have caused original sin, and bowls of oranges and grapes have been immortalized in voluptuous still-life paintings for centuries. Fruit is the candy of the plant world — the vitamins, minerals and fiber are merely a nice bonus

And after a New England winter, summer fruit is irresistable.

On the occasions I get myself to a farmers market or farmstand, I lose control. There, the fruits and berries are heaped in piles or collected in those green paper boxes that beg to be reused in craft projects.  There, you can touch and smell everything  – which is how to identify the good stuff.

But I, like most Americans, do most of my produce shopping in supermarkets, where the fruit is ice cold and often bagged or cellophaned. And while it’s almost impossible to make  choose well without access to contact or scent, I poke and sniff anyway, like a detective searching for clues.

Recently, I was tempted by a display of dark purple plums well- formed and well-priced. But they were hard as rocks and sealed in a plastic bag, so I thought better of it … until I saw the little hand-lettered sign propped up in the bin:

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

The title of that poem by William Carlos Williams is “This is Just to Say.” I remember it from an undergraduate English class, where the teacher said, “This probably only makes sense if you’re married.”

So, I bought the plums, which were, alas, not delicious. Eventually I stewed, sweetened, pureed, and then poured them over vanilla ice cream.

Plums are not my favorite fruit; they’re not even my favorite stone fruit — also known as “drupes,” which may be one of the funnier nouns in the English language.

Nectarines, which are nicer than plums, have been immortalized in interviews with “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man,” embodied by master comedian Mel Brooks, who attributes his longevity to fruit — nectarines in particular.

“It’s half a peach, half a plum. It’s a helluva fruit. It’s not too cold, not too hot. Just nice. Even a rotten one is good. That’s how much I love ’em. I’d rather eat a rotten nectarine than a fine plum.”

The Romantic poet John Keats shared Mel’s opinion in a letter he wrote in 1819, “Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine — good God how fine.”

Nectarines are wonderful, but I prefer peaches (another drupe), which satisfy all the senses: rose-gold and yellow, the color of dawn; an aroma that is that is aphrodisiacal; and velvety thin skin that yields to soft, juicy pulp that melts in the mouth. For my money, peaches are the sexiest fruit of summer.

Also a big fan on Bing cherries, another member of the drupe family. They seem sophisticated somehow – maybe it’s because they’re the color of Merlot, or that the gleaming peel suggests evening wear … although rid of the pits discretely can be a challenge.

At the start of summer, I grumbled about the way supermarkets display cherries in bags that can hold up to three pounds of fruit – a transparent marketing ploy. But those bags are unsealed, which would make it easy to offload what you don’t want or need. But the open bags are an invitation to taste, and once you taste a good cherry you realize that there is no such thing as too many cherries.

You can’t say that about watermelon — the big kahuna of summer fruit.

On a steamy hot day, a slice of cold watermelon cools you off all the way down. And for some reason, you almost have to smile while eating it.

Buying a whole watermelon is like buying a lottery ticket. It seems more prudent to choose a bright red pre-cut portion, swathed in plastic., but that’s not a guarantee of sweetness. And it’s pricey.

At least once a summer I buy a whole watermelon, using criteria gleamed from the Internet to make an informed selection: uniformity in size; rounder rather than elongated; a dull rather than shiny surface; an orange field spot (where the melon rested on the ground) rather than a white one; it should be heavy for its size and sound like a drum when slapped with an open hand.

Following those criteria doesn’t always yield a winner but this summer I got a one that would have delighted Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who wrote “Ode to a Watermelon.”

He called it the “the green whale of summer,” “firmament of coolness, “jewel box of water,” and “queen of the fruit shop,”        He wrote:

“we

Want

To bite into you,

To bury our

Face

in you, and

our hair, and

the soul.”

 

But as much as I love watermelon, peaches, and cherries, (also blueberries, plums, nectarines and all varieties of melon), for me, the queen of the fruit market is the raspberry.

I mean red raspberries the caviar of fruit, furry rubies the color of a heart newly fallen in love. Each berry is a tiny architectural wonder: 100 little beadlike druplets (real word) each of which contains a tiny seed. These are clustered around core that stays with the plant when picked – leaving behind what looks like an empty chalice.

The flavor of raspberries has been described variously as tart, floral, sour, sweet, with notes of rose and cherry. In other words, there are no words.

Raspberries are so fragile a thoughtless word can bruise them. Tossing them into fruit salad is a kind of desecration.

The flavor of raspberries has been described variously as tart, floral, sour, sweet, with notes of rose and cherry. In other words, there are no words. That said, redder berries are sweeter, and pale berries do not ripen once picked.

     You can buy raspberries all year long, packed in those half-pint plastic clamshells. They are always expensive – even on sale. In winter most are an almost ghostly pink and nearly tasteless. Adding sugar doesn’t help. And even though I know better, I buy them sometimes – nostalgic for last past summer’s cornucopia, and looking forward to the next.

Published in Cognoscenti, August 1, 2024