Dried Fruit Names

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nancy Gratch from Danville, California.

Hi, Nancy.

Well, hello, Nancy. Welcome to the program.

Oh, thank you. I’m tickled to be talking with you both.

Great. What’s up?

Well, I have been wondering, as I’ve been trying to expand my culinary skills, why, when some foods are dried, their name completely changes. Case in point, grapes to raisins and plums to prunes, and actually a whole host of other products. But those are my two big ones.

Are you discussing this with family and friends or how did this?

Well, I have been visiting this foodie website for recipes. And there’s a little place where you can blog about this, that, and the other. And I started off thinking about this when I was making enchilada sauce. And it turns out that most chilies, when they’re dried, in fact, virtually all chilies when they’re dried, changes names. And so I started blogging about this, and everybody started piping in. Apparently, this is confusing to a lot of people.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, I could see that being a problem. And what about food that is the same food item, but it has a different name?

Remember our famous green pepper and mango call, Martha?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yes.

Yes, I had that discussion about garbanzo beans and chickpeas.

Another thing as well.

They’re not the same thing, garbanzo beans and chickpeas?

They are.

I think they are.

Okay.

But so many recipes. I guess it’s regional. I hope you can tell me a little more about that. But when I started blogging about it, there were a lot of people that either said, I didn’t know garbanzo beans were chickpeas. Or if they were on the East, it was, I didn’t know chickpeas were garbanzo beans.

Well, the grape and raisin thing, I think, and the plum and prune thing we can talk, that’s definitely a language answer there, right, Martha? We get raisin and prune from the French. And in French, a grape is a raisin. It’s spelled the same way, just pronounced differently. And in French, a plum is a prune. It’s spelled the same way. And when we borrowed the words for grape and raisin, and we borrowed the words for plum and prune, we borrowed them at different times through different paths and different language channels. And so when they showed up in English, they became kind of differentiated for two different names for the same food item in kind of two different conditions.

And it’s kind of the same thing that’s happening with peppers. The peppers have an extra element, though. When peppers are cured, when they’re sun-dried, a lot of times other things are done to them, and they take on the name of the process by which they are dried, or they take on the name of the place which started that particular kind of drying for that particular kind of pepper.

They’re different ingredients, right?

That’s the key is a dried pepper is a very different thing from a whole fresh pepper.

Yeah, and think about cucumbers and pickles.

Right, exactly.

So all these different reasons. But the key is I think what solved this for me years ago is just treating them as separate ingredients. And they are not the same thing. You would almost never use a dried pepper in the same place that you would use a fresh pepper. Or a dried grape.

Very good.

Almost never, right? Plums and prunes, the same story. You’d almost never use them.

So in my house, we have a joke that garlic powder is an ingredient because we use garlic powder all the time. But we would never substitute it for a recipe that requires whole, fresh, crushed garlic or roasted garlic or any other kind of garlic. Because it’s an incredibly different ingredient, and it does a different thing, and it serves a different purpose. And it comes into the dish in a different part of the cooking process. And peppers, it’s very important to add them at the right part of the process, the right part of the cooking, so that you get the right results.

And, Nancy, I think you’ve keyed in on something that’s very true for food names and flour names. Sometimes they’re just kind of squishy, and people call different foods different things around the country. Same with flour names. A lot of times the names aren’t consistent across the botanical world.

And I guess since we need plants.

All life is like that, yeah. Some of the birds, there’s a bird out here in California called Stellar’s Jay. It’s a beautiful blue bird. It’s not as raucous as the ones you find in the Midwest. And it has something like 11 different common names. And that’s the other trap is trying to make sure you’re always talking about the same plant or the same ingredient by the same name.

Yeah.

But certainly as these websites develop, we learn a little bit about each other on each side of the coast.

Yeah.

So, Nancy, good luck with your cooking.

Yes.

Well, I feel so much better informed, and I won’t be so resentful now when I have to call something a raisin because I understand it a little bit better.

So thank you very much.

Excellent.

Thank you for calling, Nancy. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

All right.

Thanks for helping out.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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