Am I Red? Trivia Quiz

Answer:

The fruit bowl could also have included a number of other red fruits, but most of them include that fact in their name: Red Delicious apples, for example. Avoiding those giveaways narrowed the field, but we can still make a tasty selection. The java apple is the red one we want, while the Granny Smith is a bright green.

There are also a number of fruits with cultivars that have different colours, such as grapes which can commonly be red, green or blue/black. Some of them include their colour in their common name (cardinal is a strong red, and appropriate as the designation of the cardinal grape), while others, like the green Thompson seedless grape, do not. Green grapes, by the way, may be described as white grapes.

Oranges generally have, as their name implies, orange skins. Most of them also have orange flesh, but the blood orange has dark red flesh. The ruby grapefruit was another candidate for inclusion, but its flesh is really more pink than red. There are many types of citrus fruit which are orange - clementines, mandarins, tangerines, for a start - but lemons are definitely yellow of skin and flesh while limes are green.

When it comes to berries, there are a number of cross-bred types which are not definitively one specific colour - a single plant may bear berries of multiple colours, and some change from red to black as they mature. For this reason, there are no incorrect answers that are berries (although the kiwi fruit is sometimes called a Chinese gooseberry) - a blueberry would really be quite obviously not red!

Strawberries, cranberries and raspberries are probably familiar to most, as are cherries, whose colour ranges from the most common bright red to a dark purplish/black for some varieties.

Boysenberries (a dark red in colour) are a cross of four different species: European raspberry, European blackberry, American dewberry and loganberry. They look like a large red blackberry, and are easily crushed; since this makes it difficult to transport them to markets, they are usually only sold locally. Commercial producers generally process them into pies, jams ("I prefer boysenberry / More than any ordinary jam", as Paul Simon wrote in the song 'Punky's Dilemma') or similar products.

Goji berries, also called wolfberries, are the fruit from either of two closely-related members of the genus Lycium native to East Asia, where they have been used in cooking for a long time. In the 21st century, they have been touted as a superfruit, and are becoming more familiar to a Western audience.

Jujube, Ziziphus jujuba, is also known as the red date or Chinese date, which offers a good clue to the fact that the trees grow in many parts of Asia, and have a fruit which is green when not yet ripe (although it is still edible at that stage, resembling apple), and darkens as it ripens, resembling a date. When fully ripe the drupe colour may be yellow, orange, red, brown or purple (depending on the subspecies); when the fruit is dried, however, which is commonly done to preserve it, it naturally changes colour to bright red.

The lychee is an evergreen that produces fruit with a red outer covering. If you have only met lychees served in a Chinese restaurant, you may not be aware of this red outer cover, as the inner fruit is white. It is closely related to the rambutan, whose fruits are larger, with soft fleshy spikes that are responsible for its name, which is from a Malay word meaning hair. The inner fruit of the rambutan may be white or pink.

The quandong (which DOES exist, despite the fact that the Word Wizard dictionary doesn't recognise it) grows in the central deserts and southern parts of Australia. One of the best-known examples of bush tucker (food that grows in the wild and has been used by Indigenous people for thousands of years, but has not been domesticated and exploited commercially), it is often called a native peach, as it is about the same size as a peach and has a somewhat similar taste. However, it has a smooth waxy skin, which is bright red at maturity.

The fruit of the pitaya cactus (originally found in southern Mexico, now grown around the world in subtropical and tropical regions), has a red leathery skin with scaly spikes which has led to it being designated dragon fruit. It is also called a strawberry pear, descriptive of its colour and flavour. There are cultivars which are yellow, but the classic dragon fruit has a pink-red skin. The white flesh contains a multitude of small crunchy seeds, which can be eaten. Its flavour and texture have been compared to that of the kiwi fruit because of these seeds.

The red husk of the pomegranate encloses a large number (200-1500) of bright red seeds which are embedded in the inner surface (mesocarp), from which they need to be extracted individually. The tree originates in western Asia, and was one of the first fruits to be cultivated in the Mediterranean. Pomegranate juice was the original basis of grenadine syrup, although the modern commercial product is a mixture of a number of ingredients.