a rose by any other name is stone fruit, & dessert

IN ANOTHER LIFE I WAS A SCIENTIST, but in this one I got all of the curiosity but none of the education. So when the topic of Stone Fruit Week loomed as the theme for Week 4 of the Third Annual Summer Fest recipe swap (see all the links below to more, more, more), my recessive scientist trait flared and I got to asking: What’s a stone fruit, anyhow? Read on for some fun genetic facts (and a recipe for what I refer to—being scientific, you know—as the universal solvent of all fruit desserts, clafoutis batter).What’s a Stone Fruit?

WHAT WE CALL STONE FRUITS all grow on trees in the genus Prunus, and have a hard, stony pit inside them (their seed), with fleshy fruit around it—unlike so-called pome fruits (see below).

Apricots, cherries, nectarines, plums (and therefore prunes), and some interspecies hybrids of the above, like plumcots and pluots, are all stone fruits. So are peaches (like the ones in the 1940 harvesting photo by Lee Russell, in the Library of Congress archive, top, or just above in the print from Boston Public Library’s).

And then there’s the trick-question one, the stone fruit you think of as a nut. What’s that?

Almond, of course: Prunus dulcis.

What’s a Pome Fruit?

I KNOW, IT’S STONE FRUIT WEEK, but hey, this is interesting…and there will be a point made any moment (or so the headline promised).

Other popular edible tree-grown fruits in our neck of the world include the pome fruits—apples and pears, in the genus Malus and Pyrus, respectively. The word pome simply comes from the Latin word for fruit.

And here comes my point:

But They’re All Roses in Disguise!

STONE OR POME, THEY’RE ALL ROSES—meaning members of the Rose Family, or Rosaceae, and therefore all related.

That’s the overarching botanical “aha,” one that I

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