French Blog

Who doesn’t enjoy une salade de fruits?

There’s no limit on the sort of fruits you can throw into the mix: All fruits are most cordially welcome: Pas de “fruit défendu“, pour ainsi dire ! (No “forbidden fruit”, so to speak!) In fact, your imagination is the only limit, so that your salade de fruit can then turn, literally, as the expression goes, into  ”le pur fruit de votre imagination“ (“the pure fruit of your imagination.”)

              Dessin animé des “Fruttis“ (Fruttis cartoon)

In a previous post, we invited you to become a connaisseur (or “coinoisseur”) of les légumes (vegetables), to earn the title of “grosse légume“ en quelque sorte (a “big shot” of sorts) on the subject matter: “Quelle légume détestez/préférez-vous le plus? (What vegetable do you hate/like the most?)”

Today, we follow up with the different types of the main fruits, discovering each one of their names en français, according to the categories they fall into.

Commençons par les “fruits légumes“ (Let’s start with the fruit vegetables) which we have already seen in the last post. They include la tomate, les olives, le poivron: vert, rouge, et jaune (peppers: Green, red, yellow), as well asaubergine (eggplant), la courge (squash), la citrouille (pumpkin), and the courgette (zucchini.)

                  Quel gâchis de sauce tomate ! (What waste of tomato sauce!)

Depending on their core content, fruits can either be “fruits à pépins” (“pome fruits”) or fruits à noyau.  As the name already suggests, the most famous of those “pome fruits” is la pomme (apple.) Similarly, la poire (pear) belongs to the same category, together with the nèfles du japon (In English, “loquat”, or “japanese plums”) and le coing (quince), which -à propos (by the way)- makes a delicious  confiture (jam)! (Quince jam)!

Quel délice ! A broader category of fruits is definitely the one of les fruits tropicaux. Most notables of which are les bananes (bananas), with its variant la banane plantain (plantain), l’ananas(pinapple… Did someone say: “Je suis un ananas”?), le fruit de la passion (passion fruit), le kiwi, les figues (figs, obviously), la mangue (mango), la goyave (guava), and la papaye (papaya.)

  Attention! Ce fruit a un “goût explosif”  (Warning! The taste of this fruit is “pure blast”)

The other categories that we ought not passer sous silence (fail to mention) are the ”melons” and the ”agrumes”(“citrus fruits.”)

You’d be wrong to assume that there’s only one type of melon: Of course, there’s la pastèque (watermelon), but there is also the melon d’Ogen (Ogen melon), le melon de miel (honeydew melon), le melon brodé (muskmelon), and there is also, in the same category, le cantaloup (cantaloupe.) 

As for the “agrumes“, they form the group to which belong l’orange (orange) and its little sister, la mandarine(mandarin), le citron (lemon) and its green sosie (lookalike), la lime (lime.)

Finally, a word of caution must be said about not two, not three, but *four* agrumes fruits, the names of which happen to be des “faux-amis” (“false friends”) between English and French.

The French “citron“ corresponds to the English “lemon“; however, the English “citron” is called in French “le cédrat.”
Similarly, the French ”pomelo” is called in English “grapefruit”; however, the English “pomelo” corresponds the French“pamplemousse” !

En résumé (In short):
* citron [fr.] = lemon [eng.]
* pomelo [fr.] = grapefruit [eng.]
* pamplemousse [fr.] = pomelo [eng.]