Acerola
A small bright-red Caribbean cherry-like fruit packed with extraordinarily high vitamin C — used in juices and supplements rather than fresh eating because of its short shelf life.
105 fruits containing the letter E — each with origin, classification, and notes.
Below are fruits that contain the letter E anywhere in the name. Each of the 105 fruits below opens to a full profile.
A small bright-red Caribbean cherry-like fruit packed with extraordinarily high vitamin C — used in juices and supplements rather than fresh eating because of its short shelf life.
A West African red-skinned fruit that opens to reveal yellow custard-textured arils — the national fruit of Jamaica, but lethally toxic if eaten before fully ripe.
A small, thick-skinned wild African citrus with intensely fragrant peel and tart pulp — used more for marmalade and traditional medicine than fresh eating.
A Japanese vine fruit with a pale-purple pod that splits open along its length when ripe, exposing translucent white-grey flesh studded with tiny black seeds — eaten as a brief seasonal delicacy.
An odd umbrella-leafed forest plant with a single yellow fruit hidden under its canopy — edible only when fully ripe, and toxic in every other part.
A pome fruit of the rose family, originally from the mountains of Central Asia, now grown in over 7,500 named varieties across the temperate world.
A tropical hybrid fruit — cherimoya × sugar apple — with sweet creamy white flesh, large dark seeds, and a tropical flavor between vanilla custard and pineapple, eaten fresh in tropical regions.
A sacred Indian fruit tree — the bael (Bengal quince or stone apple) is one of the most revered plants in Hinduism, its trifoliate leaves used in Shiva worship; the fruit is a hard-shelled sphere the size of a large orange, with dry, orange, aromatic flesh inside that is eaten fresh or made into a beloved Indian drink; dried bael slices are a staple of traditional Ayurvedic medicine.
The citrus fruit that gives Earl Grey tea its distinctive floral, perfumed flavour — a sour, pear-shaped orange-yellow fruit grown almost exclusively in Calabria, southern Italy; too bitter to eat fresh, its cold-pressed rind oil is one of the most important aromatic compounds in perfumery and flavouring.
A small dark blue European wild berry — close cousin of the blueberry, but smaller, darker, more intensely flavored, and almost impossible to cultivate commercially.
A green-skinned Mexican fruit whose ripe interior turns into a thick chocolate-pudding-like brown mash — eaten with a spoon or used as a vegan chocolate substitute.
A glossy black aggregate fruit of bramble vines — fierce wild thickets across temperate regions and the most-foraged fruit in many countries, with intense sweet-tart flavor and abundant seeds.
A red-fleshed orange variety from Sicily and Spain — its dramatic red color comes from anthocyanins triggered by cold winter nights, a chemistry trick most citrus regions can't replicate.
A small, deep-blue North American berry famous for its high antioxidant content, eaten fresh or in baked goods, jams, and breakfast cereals.
A large dark purple hybrid berry created in 1920s California — half blackberry, half raspberry, with logan and dewberry mixed in — that became a Disneyland concession and Knott's Berry Farm legacy.
A large green tropical fruit with starchy white flesh that bakes to a bread-like texture — staple food across the Pacific Islands and Caribbean, the cargo that triggered the famous Mutiny on the Bounty.
A magenta-fleshed prickly cactus fruit (also called prickly pear or tuna) with a sweet melon-watermelon flavor — heavily harvested in Mexico, Sicily, and the American Southwest.
A bright orange Caribbean fruit (also called egg-fruit) with the dry mealy texture of a hard-boiled egg yolk — eaten fresh, in shakes, or as a chilled custard.
An orange-fleshed netted melon — the muskmelon of summer markets, named after a papal estate in Italy, eaten chilled with prosciutto or as a breakfast staple.
A bred-for-extreme chili pepper that held the Guinness record as the world's hottest from 2013 to 2023, with an averaged 1.6 million Scoville heat units.
An Australian rainforest citrus whose elongated finger-shaped fruits burst with translucent pearl-like vesicles — a high-end garnish that exploded in popularity with molecular cuisine.
A close cousin of jackfruit grown across Malaysia and Indonesia — smaller, sweeter, more pungent, and rarely seen outside Southeast Asia because of its overpowering smell.
A heart-shaped Andean fruit with green dimpled skin and creamy custard-like flesh — described by Mark Twain as "the most delicious fruit known to men," with a flavor that combines banana, pineapple, and strawberry.
A small stone fruit of the rose family, with sweet eating varieties and tart pie varieties — pitted and bright in pies, preserves, and liqueurs.
A diverse family of fiery fruits from the Capsicum genus — used fresh, dried, smoked, ground, and fermented across nearly every world cuisine.
A small, easy-peeling, seedless winter mandarin — accidentally created in an Algerian orphanage garden in 1902, now the most popular winter snack citrus in Western countries.
A rare orange-amber Arctic berry that grows in remote bogs across the boreal north — Scandinavia's most prized wild berry, with no commercial cultivation despite decades of attempts.
The largest seed in the plant kingdom — a giant Seychelles double-coconut weighing up to 25 kg, so rare that each individual fruit is government-tracked.
The wild ancestor of all cultivated apples — small, intensely sour or bitter fruits from wild and ornamental trees, generally too harsh to eat raw but exceptional for making jelly, cider, and crab apple wine; the pectin-rich juice gels easily and the flavour — honeyed, floral, and tart — is unlike any cultivated apple.
A small, intensely tart red berry of North American wetlands — turned into Thanksgiving sauce by colonial Americans and into urinary-tract-infection folklore by mid-20th-century medicine.
The sweet sticky fruit of the date palm, dried and energy-dense, a staple of Middle Eastern and North African cuisine for thousands of years.
A small dark purple-black berry from the elder shrub, eaten cooked into syrups, wines, and preserves — toxic when raw, beloved when properly prepared.
A small green ovoid fruit (also called pineapple guava) with intensely fragrant, jelly-textured flesh — a New Zealand orchard staple but virtually unknown elsewhere because it doesn't ship.
An Australian native citrus shaped like a small finger that releases tiny "caviar pearls" of tart citrus juice when cut open — a fine-dining garnish prized for its visual drama and crisp acidity.
An aromatic Israeli muskmelon hybrid created in the 1970s — netted yellow skin with pale green sweet flesh, considered the most fragrant of the supermarket melons.
A small translucent green or red berry — once Britain's favorite hedgerow fruit, the subject of competitive gooseberry-growing societies, and the base of classic English fool desserts.
A small berry of a woody vine, eaten fresh, dried as raisins, or fermented into wine — one of humanity's oldest cultivated fruits.
A large bitter-tart citrus, a hybrid of pomelo and sweet orange that emerged in 18th-century Barbados, eaten fresh or juiced and famous for drug interactions.
Small clustered berries from a woody vine — eaten fresh, dried into raisins, pressed for juice, or fermented into the world's most important beverage, wine.
The most complex and honey-sweet of all plums — a green-skinned, golden-fleshed European plum with a flavour of remarkable depth, described as combining honey, apricot, and fresh cream; considered by many to be the best-tasting plum variety, though its thin skin, tendency to split, and small size make it commercially unviable.
The botanical name for falsa — a small purple South Asian summer berry, also known as Phalsa, used in cooling drinks and Ayurvedic medicine across the subcontinent.
A long blue Siberian honeysuckle berry (also called haskap) that ripens before strawberries, survives -40°F winters, and tastes like a blueberry-raspberry-blackberry hybrid.
A pale-green melon with smooth white-yellow rind and pale-green flesh, milder and sweeter than cantaloupe — a summertime hydration fruit.
A wild dark berry of the western North American mountains — beloved by hikers, hunted by bears, and impossible to cultivate, sustaining a regional Pacific Northwest jam-and-pie economy.
A small bright orange African fruit related to the mangosteen, with a thin skin enclosing tart-sweet juicy flesh — eaten fresh or fermented into a drink.
A medium-hot Mexican chili pepper with thick walls and bright vegetal heat — eaten fresh, pickled, smoked into chipotles, or stuffed and breaded.
An East Asian plum species that's the basis for most modern American supermarket plums — large, juicy, with red or yellow skin and easily separated flesh from a small pit.
A 1970s German hybrid combining blackcurrant and gooseberry — thornless, vigorous, productive, and almost unknown commercially despite decades of championing by horticulture writers.
A small Asian fruit (also called Chinese date or red date) that turns from apple-crisp green to wrinkled-skinned brown-red as it dries — eaten fresh, dried, or simmered in tonics.
Not actually a berry but the female cone of the juniper tree — a small dark blue spice used for centuries to flavor gin, game meats, and northern European preserves.
A bumpy-skinned Southeast Asian citrus whose **leaves matter more than the fruit** — fragrant double-lobed leaves are an essential herb in Thai, Malaysian, and Indonesian cooking.
A bright yellow citrus with sharply acidic juice and aromatic peel — possibly the single most-used fruit in the global kitchen for its capacity to brighten everything.
A small, intensely acidic green citrus — the namesake of "limey" sailors, the soul of margaritas and ceviche, with the Persian and Key versions producing distinct flavors despite similar appearance.
A small, tart red berry of the boreal forests of Scandinavia, North America, and Russia — similar in appearance to cranberry but smaller and sharper; the essential condiment of Swedish cuisine, served with meatballs, game, and pancakes.
A 19th-century California garden hybrid — half blackberry, half raspberry, dark red, intensely flavored, and the historical ancestor of modern boysenberries and tayberries.
A small Chinese fruit with rough red shell and translucent white flesh of perfumed sweetness — a 2,000-year-old delicacy referenced in Chinese poetry and one of the most prized tropical fruits.
A small dark Patagonian berry (also called calafate) — Tierra del Fuego's iconic fruit, with a folk legend that whoever eats one will return to Patagonia.
A large Caribbean fruit (Mammea americana, distinct from mamey sapote) with intensely fragrant orange flesh — eaten fresh, stewed, or fermented into Antillean wines and liqueurs.
A large football-shaped Mexican fruit with brown rough skin and dense salmon-pink flesh — the defining flavor of Cuban-Mexican milkshakes and tropical ice cream.
A small loose-skinned orange citrus — the original ancestor species behind clementines, satsumas, tangerines, and most modern winter snack-citrus varieties.
A purple-shelled tropical Asian fruit with snow-white segmented flesh of intense sweet-tart flavor — the "queen of fruits" to many connoisseurs, banned from U.S. import for decades, now slowly returning.
An Oregon-bred blackberry hybrid, named for Marion County — the defining berry of Pacific Northwest pies, jams, and ice cream, prized for its complex sweet-tart flavor.
An ancient European fruit that must be eaten after it has partially rotted (bletting) — small, brown, and unprepossessing, with a sweet, apple-butter-like flesh consumed only after frost has softened it; beloved in medieval Europe, nearly forgotten today.
The general category covering hundreds of *Cucumis melo* varieties — cantaloupes, honeydews, galias, casabas, and dozens more — eaten across cultures from breakfast to dessert.
A sweeter, thinner-skinned lemon with floral orange notes — a natural hybrid of lemon and mandarin orange discovered in China and popularised in California; prized for its edible skin, minimal bitterness, and fragrant juice.
A small West African red berry that **temporarily makes sour foods taste sweet** — chewing one transforms lemon and vinegar into sugary treats for about an hour.
The fruit of the Swiss cheese plant — a fragrant tropical curiosity that ripens over 12 months, tastes like pineapple-banana, and is mildly toxic until fully ripe.
A grape-sized Mexican vine fruit (also called Mexican sour gherkin or cucamelon) that looks exactly like a tiny watermelon but tastes like a tart cucumber-lime.
A long, blackberry-like fruit grown across temperate regions of the world — often available free from neighborhood trees, vital for silkworms, and beloved by birds.
The catch-all category for fragrant netted-skin melons including American cantaloupes — named for the musky aroma of fully ripe fruit, central to summer fruit traditions worldwide.
The Asian pear — round, apple-shaped, with golden-yellow skin and exceptionally crisp, juicy, grainy white flesh; doesn't soften like European pears but is eaten firm and crunchy, with a clean sweet flavour.
A smooth-skinned variant of the peach, the same species genetically with one gene difference, often slightly more tart and aromatic than its fuzzy cousin.
A small drupe whose **inedible-fresh** bitter flesh becomes an essential Mediterranean food only after curing — eaten as table olives or pressed into the world's oldest culinary oil.
A bright citrus with sweet juicy flesh and aromatic peel, the world's most widely cultivated fruit by tonnage and the namesake for the color itself.
A Russian heritage cultivar of small ornamental-style pears, often used for preserves and country-style cookery, prized for hardiness in cold climates.
A fuzzy-skinned stone fruit of the rose family with sweet aromatic flesh and a single woody pit, originating in China and now grown in temperate orchards worldwide.
A pome fruit of the rose family — closely related to apples but with grittier flesh and a teardrop shape, with thousands of varieties and a unique post-harvest ripening behavior.
An orange-red fall fruit with two distinct varieties — astringent (must be fully ripe) and non-astringent (eaten firm) — central to Korean and Japanese autumn traditions, dried into kaki sticks.
A tropical multiple fruit with spiky armor and a crown of leaves, sweet and acidic, eaten fresh, juiced, grilled, or canned.
A white strawberry with red seeds and intense pineapple-vanilla flavor — a re-bred near-extinct South American wild strawberry that's become a viral specialty fruit since 2010.
A tough-skinned fruit packed with hundreds of jewel-like seeds (arils), each surrounded by tart-sweet juice — a Persian native steeped in mythology.
The largest of all citrus fruits — a yellow-green Southeast Asian giant with thick pith and sweet, mild grapefruit-like flesh, an ancestor species of the modern grapefruit.
A pear-shaped, fragrant, hard-fleshed fruit eaten almost exclusively cooked — the basis of Spanish *membrillo* paste and a foundational ingredient in Mediterranean and Persian sweets.
A small, intensely-flavored aggregate fruit of a thorny rose-family bramble, eaten fresh or cooked into preserves, sauces, and brandy.
A small, jewel-like red berry — translucent, intensely tart, and a classic Northern European garden fruit used in jellies, sauces for game, and showcase dessert garnishes.
A pear-shaped Southeast Asian fruit (also called wax apple or jambu) with crisp pale flesh, sweet rosewater scent, and a near-empty hollow center — eaten fresh as a hot-weather refresher.
The fruit of the rose plant — a small, red to orange oval berry produced after the flower fades; one of the richest plant sources of vitamin C; made into syrup, jam, herbal tea, and soup, most famously as rose hip syrup distributed to British children during WWII rationing.
A bright orange-pink Pacific Northwest forest raspberry — eaten fresh by hikers, cooked traditionally by Coast Salish peoples, a key indicator of healthy temperate rainforest ecology.
A general Spanish-language category covering several unrelated tropical fruits with soft sweet flesh — the most common are white sapote, mamey sapote, and black sapote, each from a different botanical family.
A thorny coastal shrub producing dense clusters of tiny bright orange berries — extraordinarily rich in vitamin C (ten times more than oranges), omega-7 fatty acids, and carotenoids; the astringent, intensely sour berries are too sharp to eat raw but make vivid orange juice, jams, and syrups popular across Northern Europe and Russia.
North America's versatile wild fruit — small, blueberry-sized purple-red berries from the Amelanchier shrub/tree, with a sweet, almond-flavoured flesh beloved by birds and foragers; also called Juneberry, Saskatoon, or Shadbush.
The bitter orange used for the world's most celebrated marmalade — too sour and pungent to eat fresh, its thick peel and intensely flavoured juice are perfect for jam-making; the brief winter season (January–February) is eagerly awaited by British marmalade makers, and the orange's history in Spain stretches to the Moorish period.
The fruit of the blackthorn — a small, purple-black berry so astringent when eaten raw that it causes involuntary puckering; almost exclusively used to make sloe gin by macerating the frost-damaged berries in gin with sugar for months.
A large round Caribbean fruit with milky-sweet white pulp arranged in a star pattern around the seeds — a Jamaican and Cuban favorite eaten fresh or in the elegant Cuban dessert "matrimonio."
A small red aggregate fruit with seeds on the outside, a hybrid that emerged in 18th-century France from a chance crossing of North and South American species.
A small red ribbed Brazilian backyard fruit (also called pitanga) with intense complex flavor between cherry, raspberry, and tropical resin — extreme polarity between underripe (terrible) and ripe (delicious).
A tangerine-pomelo hybrid with a distinctive nipple-like bump at the stem end — juicy, sweet-tart, easy to peel, and the genetic ancestor of several modern grocery citrus varieties.
A small, sweet, easy-to-peel citrus fruit, a member of the mandarin orange family that gives most modern citrus hybrids their sweetness.
A 1970s Scottish blackberry-raspberry hybrid named for the river Tay — long sweet-tart wine-red fruit with intense flavor, popular in home gardens but virtually absent from supermarkets.
Japanese salt-pickled sour plums — not actually a plum but a pickled ume apricot, intensely sour and salty, eaten as a rice accompaniment, used as a natural preservative, and believed in Japan to cure everything from hangovers to bacterial infections.
A large, water-rich melon with a thick striped rind and bright pink-red flesh — a summer staple worldwide and originally an African crop.
A pale translucent variety of redcurrant — sweeter, less acidic, eaten fresh more than its red sibling, and once a fixture of Victorian dessert tables for its jewel-like appearance.
A green-skinned Mexican fruit (Casimiroa edulis) with creamy custard-like flesh and a banana-vanilla-pear flavor — citrus family relative, despite the deceptive sapote name and total lack of citrus character.
A small, sour-sweet yellow-orange fruit known as wild plum or sea lemon, eaten across African savannas and used for its oil-rich seed in traditional cosmetics.
Also called yangmei or Chinese bayberry — a knobbly red or purple fruit native to East Asia with sweet-tart flavor, high antioxidant content, and a brief, fragile fresh season.
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