The fleshy part of a pear is swollen stalk, not the true fruit
Bite into a pear and most of what you eat is the swollen tip of the flower stalk. The true fruit is the gritty core in the middle, two to five tough chambers holding the seeds. Botanists call this arrangement a pome, and the pear shares it with its close relative, the apple.
Pears form the genus Pyrus in the rose family. The genus probably began on the lower slopes of the Tian Shan mountains of today's western China, then spread north and south along mountain chains into more than 20 main species. People domesticated pears twice, once in China and once in Asia Minor near the Caucasus. Wild fruits are tiny, 1 to 4 centimetres across, while some cultivated ones reach 18 centimetres long, and not every pear is pear-shaped: the nashi pear looks remarkably like an apple.
Cultivation is very old. Traces turn up in prehistoric lake dwellings around Lake Zurich, and China was growing pears by 2000 BC. The word pear, or something like it, exists in every Celtic language, and names in Slavic and other tongues vary so much that the botanist Alphonse de Candolle concluded the tree had been cultivated from the Caspian to the Atlantic since very early times. The English word itself runs back through Latin pirum, probably to an ancient Mediterranean language.
Medieval kings prized them. The household records of England's Henry III show London's sheriffs presenting the king with pears brought over from La Rochelle. Many pears in English medieval gardens had French names, and one favourite was named after Saint Rieul, a bishop of Senlis in northern France. In 12th-century Spain, Ibn al-Awwam included pear growing in his Book on Agriculture.
About 3,000 varieties now exist, and in 2024 the world grew roughly 28 million tonnes, 76 percent of it in China. Pears are eaten fresh, canned, dried or juiced, or fermented into perry. The trees also yield a prized timber, favoured for fine woodwind instruments and furniture. Some species survive winters down to minus 40 degrees Celsius, though many orchard varieties suffer in hard frost.
Source: Pear
