Fruit family reunions: wild cousins of the fruits you already love

Every fruit in your kitchen has relatives — usually wilder, often rarer, and frequently more interesting than the familiar face at the supermarket. We’ve just added a big batch of these lesser-known cousins to FruitLore, and the best way to explore them is by starting from a fruit you already love. Here are eight family reunions worth attending.

If you love oranges → meet the blood orange and Seville

The sweet orange has dramatic siblings. The blood orange flushes crimson when cold nights trigger its anthocyanins, tasting of raspberry and cherry beneath the citrus; the Seville orange is too bitter to eat but makes the world’s great marmalade. Both are the same species as your breakfast orange, gone in wildly different directions.

If you love plums → meet the damson and greengage

The plum family runs deep. The damson is too tart to bite but transcendent as jam and gin; the greengage looks unripe even when it’s the sweetest plum on earth; the tiny golden mirabelle becomes France’s finest fruit brandy. One species, three revelations.

If you love raspberries → meet the black raspberry

The black raspberry looks like a blackberry but pops off its core hollow like a true raspberry — and it carries some of the highest antioxidant levels of any fruit. For tangled hybrids, the boysenberry and tayberry cross raspberry with blackberry into something richer than either.

If you love mangosteen → meet kokum and achacha

The mangosteen has a whole clan of Garcinia cousins. India’s kokum dries into a purple souring agent and cooling monsoon drink; Bolivia’s achacha tastes of honeyed lemonade; and the Central American lemon drop mangosteen tastes uncannily like sherbet candy.

If you love jujube → meet the ber

The jujube has a tropical twin: the ber, or Indian jujube, a crisp apple-like fruit that ripens in the punishing dry-season heat when almost nothing else will, eaten across South Asia and Africa with salt and chili.

If you love wax apple → meet the Malay apple

The crisp, watery wax apple and rose apple have a deeper-colored relative in the Malay apple — a glossy crimson bell of a fruit that ancient Polynesians carried across the Pacific in their canoes.

And one with no supermarket cousin at all → guaraná

Some fruits are simply their own thing. Guaraná, the Amazonian vine whose red fruit splits to reveal a black seed set in white flesh — looking exactly like an eye — is packed with several times the caffeine of a coffee bean, and powers Brazil’s national soft drink.

The point of the family tree

Learning fruit by family is the fastest way to expand your palate. Once you know that the citron, lemon, lime, and orange are all branches of the same small citrus family tree, or that half the world’s tart preserving fruits are plum relatives, a market stall stops being a wall of strangers and becomes a set of introductions. Start from what you love, follow the branch, and see where it leads — there are hundreds of cousins waiting.