W e take as much pleasure biting into fruits and berries as we have for thousands of years. As the ‘eaters’, we think we’re the winners. But it’s a two-way relationship. The ‘eaten’ wins, too. If you are rooted to the spot, you need something that’s mobile to help you disperse your seeds. Sweet, ripe, juicy flesh is an inducement; it tempts us (and animals, birds and insects) to tuck in and, one way or another, disperse seeds. This successful strategy has seen seeds become the original globe trotters.

If seed dispersal was an Olympic sport, it’s unlikely we would make the finals. As competitors, we are outclassed. A thirsty hyena can chomp through 18 tsamma melons in a night then disperse seeds over a home range of some 400 square kilometres (150 square miles). This is impressive, but possibly pales alongside a black bear sitting around gorging up to 30,000 berries in a day, then distributing thousands of seeds over its territory.

There’s a smart evolutionary explanation for our sweet tooth. Hunting and gathering are hard work, day in, day out. Discovering that the sweet, ripe fruits dangling on a branch or bright berries on a bush were safe to pick and eat was a no-brainer. Bitterness, on the other hand, helped us steer clear of plants with potentially tummy-upsetting toxins.

The sweetness in fruits and berries that spells ‘safe to eat’ comes from natural sugars – typically fructose (or fruit sugar), glucose and sucrose. Amounts range from a mere trace in limes to almost 60 per cent in dates. And although sugars in themselves aren’t a health food, in fruits they are accompanied by really good stuff, such as fibre, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients including eye-catching carotenes in orange-fleshed fruits like mangoes, papaya and peaches and anthocyanins in all blue–purple berries. And, of course, vitamin C.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

‘Fruit is a most important item in the economy of health; the epicurean can scarcely be said to have any luxuries without it; therefore, as it is so invaluable, when we cannot have it fresh, we must have it preserved.’ said Mrs Beeton in her Book of Household Management (1861).

Ever since we became farmers, we’ve preserved summer’s harvest one way or another to make sure we had food to put on the table through the winter. We made the most of the sun to dry fruit and, according to archaeological records, fire and hot sand mounds did the same job. Drying keeps bacteria at bay by reducing water content (from around 90 per cent to 5–35 per cent) and concentrating the sugars. Sun-drying is still carried out in many parts of the world, Turkish sun-dried apricots, for instance.

However, the dried fruits on supermarket shelves – from tree fruit such as apples, apricots, dates, figs, muscatels, peaches, pears, prunes (dried plums) and vine fruits including sultanas (golden raisins), raisins, and currants – are generally dried in dehydrators. Processors typically add sulphur dioxide (E220) to ensure fruits keep their appealing colour and texture and prevent them from oxidising and browning. Organic versions may not have good looks on their side (they are often darker) but they are equally delicious if not more so. Some very tart fruits are sweetened before drying. Regular dried cranberries (sometimes called craisins) can have quite large amounts of added sugar.

If you want to try your hand at drying fruit, you will need about 4 kilograms of fresh grapes to produce 1 kilogram of sultanas and 6 kilograms of ripe tree fruits for 1 kilogram dried. If you get enthusiastic and invest in an electric dehydrator, don’t limit yourself to fruit. Try drying tomatoes, capsicums (peppers), chillies, mushrooms and even kale.

At some point, our forebears discovered that storing fruit in honey meant it lasted longer. Boosting the sugar content prevents bacterial growth because sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it has a tendency to absorb moisture, reducing the amount of water available for encouraging microorganisms. This method of preservation also tends to draw water from microbes, thus dehydrating and killing them.

Preserving whole fruit or fruit pieces so they kept their shape without having to add any sugar came with the discovery of sterilisation in the 19th century and the availability of affordable reusable containers you could sterilise such as the Mason jar. Many of us remember our mothers and grandmothers in steamy kitchens at summer’s end busily transforming nature’s abundance into glistening jars of fruit, preserves, jams and chutneys.

BOTTLING

In Kate’s mum’s kitchen, it was all hands on deck for bottling and jam making. It was not just about providing for the winter months. It was a highly competitive local sport. In her story-packed country cookbook, Apple Blossom Pie , Kate describes how ‘the noble art of fruit bottling culminated at local agricultural shows where intricate pieces of edible art were showcased in tall Fowlers jars with brass-coloured lids, clipped by a spring to the neck, or with taut, concave cellophane throttled by a rubber band’. Her mum and nan bottled vegetables, too. She remembers many a late night, knitting needle in hand, fastidiously trying to arrange a decorative slice of carrot in a mosaic pattern with green beans and peas. Kate still bottles fruit. It’s the habit of a lifetime living by the seasons.