Rubus idaeus and hybrids
Red raspberry is the familiar hollow-centered bramble fruit of northern gardens and hedgerows, and in the Northeast it sits close to the line between cultivated berry and wild foraged summer fruit.1 Each berry is an aggregate of many small drupelets attached to a conical receptacle, so the empty center in a picked raspberry is not damage but the ordinary result of the fruit letting go of that core.1
Blackberries and raspberries are both Rubus, but they part company at harvest. A blackberry comes away with its dry plug still attached, while the raspberry leaves that plug behind on the plant, which helps explain the raspberry’s lighter, hollower shape.2 North American red raspberry was widely used by settlers and eventually domesticated alongside European material, and commercial breeding now moves easily between summer-bearing canes that fruit in their second year and fall-bearing canes that crop on first-year growth.1
In the kitchen, raspberries punch above their size because they carry a concentrated aroma built around the compound called raspberry ketone, supported by violet-like ionones.3 They are also rich enough in pectin for jams and preserves, but the fresh fruit is notoriously short-lived: thin skins and an unusually active metabolism make ripe raspberries among the most fragile and perishable fruits after harvest.13
Footnotes
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 86 (PDF p. 121). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 88 (PDF p. 123). ↩
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Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, rev. ed. (Scribner, 2004), PDF p. 376. ↩ ↩2