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Charlotte Scott Types of peaches run into the thousands, with more than 2,000 named varieties recorded worldwide. All of them descend from a fruit first gathered and planted in eastern China, where peach stones more than 7,500 years old have been recovered from sites in Zhejiang Province. From there the peach travelled west along trade routes to … Read more
Types of watermelon number in the hundreds, yet almost every one traces back to a single desert fruit from northeast Africa. The plant was being farmed in the Nile Valley thousands of years ago, reached China by about the 10th century and arrived in the Americas with European colonists and enslaved Africans in the 1500s … Read more
Fruits that are purple on the inside are far scarcer than fruits that are purple on the outside. Concord grapes, plums, eggplants and passion fruit all wear purple skin over flesh that is green, yellow or white. Even the blueberry, the fruit most people would name first, is pale green once you bite it in … Read more
Fruits that are pink on the inside tend to keep the secret until the knife goes through. A grapefruit is yellow, a guava is pale green, and a mamey sapote looks like a dusty brown potato, yet each one opens to flesh the color of a rose or a slice of salmon. Few colors in … Read more
Fruits that are green on the inside catch most people off guard, because we learn early that green means unripe. Bananas, tomatoes and strawberries all start out green and leave the color behind as they sweeten. A small group of fruits never makes that switch, and they taste best while the flesh is still the … Read more
Orange colored fruits get their color from carotenoids, a family of pigments that the human body can turn into vitamin A. Unlike the red and purple pigments in berries, carotenoids dissolve in fat and not in water. They do not bleed into juice or batter, and they survive cooking almost unchanged. Carotenoids usually color the … Read more
Green colored fruits are green because of chlorophyll, the same pigment that colors leaves. In most fruits, chlorophyll breaks down at ripening and other colors take over. That is why green so often means not ready. The fruits on this list defy that rule in 3 different ways. Some stay green even when fully ripe, … Read more
Purple colored fruits owe their color to anthocyanins, the same pigments that make other fruits red, only packed in more densely. The exact shade depends on how acidic the fruit’s cells are, with more acid pushing the color toward red and less acid toward blue. A waxy surface film, called bloom, adds the dusty blue … Read more
Purple vegetables bring an unusual combination of color, texture, and flavor to the kitchen garden. Their deep shades can range from soft lavender and violet to rich purple-black, depending on the vegetable and variety. Many of these vegetables are familiar crops that have purple cultivars, while others are naturally recognized for their colorful leaves, stems, … Read more
White colored fruits are white because something is missing, not because something was added. No fruit makes a white pigment. Flesh or skin looks white when it has no red, yellow, or green pigments and light scatters off the tiny air spaces between its cells. That absence shows up in 2 ways. In most cases … Read more