Ripeness matters. Ask any rabid tomato or strawberry lover who spends most of the year in wise denial while waiting for that perfect ripeness. So firm is the focus on ripeness that one could be forgiven for thinking ripeness is a moment as cruelly sharp as the blade of a shiv. Here today; a goner tomorrow.
Yet ripeness can be a much more relative concept than one might expect.
“Really, ripeness is a personal thing,” says Tovah Martin, a horticulturist and writer based in Roxbury, Conn. “For example, I eat gooseberries when they’re overripe. I’ve tried them the other way and, eh, nothing. But let them get slightly overripe, and to me, they’re delicious. That’s the beauty of being a gardener. You can experiment and define ripeness for yourself.”
“Webster’s New World College Dictionary” defines ripe as: “fully grown or developed … ready to be harvested and used for food, as grain or fruit.”
Harold McGee, in his landmark book, “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen,” wrote that ripening was “long considered to be an early stage in the fruit’s general disintegration. But now it’s clear that ripening is a last, intense phase of life. As it ripens, the fruit actively prepares itself for its end, organizing itself into a feast for our eye and palate.”
