is a name commonly applied to various small fruits. There is a difference between everyday usage and the botanical definition. A typical version of the latter is: ‘a many-seeded inferior pulp fruit, the seeds of which are, when mature, scattered through the pulp.’ This definition includes the bilberry, cranberry, currant, gooseberry, and grape. But it also includes unexpected items: cucumber, banana, date, papaya; apple, pear (both pomes); and the citrus fruits orange and lemon, and it excludes a number of fruits commonly referred to as berries. Thus the huckleberry is not a berry but a drupe (a fruit with a stone or stones, hard casings around the seeds). The blackberry and raspberry are strictly ‘etaerios of druplets’, clusters of little fruits with stones. Mulberry is a composite fruit called ‘sorosis’, as is the pineapple. The strawberry is a ‘false’ fruit, being the swollen receptacle which bears an ‘etaerio of achenes’, i.e. the pips which are the true fruits of the plant.
Fortunately, the NSOED also allows a commonsense definition: ‘Any small globular or ovate juicy fruit not having a stone.’ In Old English, berrie used to refer chiefly to the grape. Etymologically it is difficult to unravel the word and the limits of its application. Various derivations have been proposed, some leading back to Sanskrit words. One possibility, not the one most favoured by lexicographers, is that the word is of Celtic origin, and means ‘red’, comparing it with Middle Irish ‘basc’, which also means red.
The notion of a classification based on colour, ‘red’ being wide enough to include the orange-through-to-black colour range found in berries, tallies with a recurrent theme in Graeco-Romano mythology, where the colour of the berry in question is explained as being the result of blood spillage: the blackberry is from the blood of the Titans; the raspberry is stained red with the blood of the nymph Ida. (And the mulberry is black from the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe, the ill-fated lovers in the ill-fated play acted by Bottom and his cronies in A Midsummer Night's Dream.)
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
