BOTANIC Fruit

Botanic fruit and culinary fruit

Venn diagram representing the relationship between (culinary) vegetables and (botanical) fruits. Some vegetables fall into both categories.

Many foods are botanically fruit, but are treated as vegetables in cooking and food preparation. These include cucurbits (e.g., squash, pumpkin, and cucumber), tomato, peas, beans, corn, eggplant, and sweet pepper, spices, such as allspice and chillies.^[2] Occasionally, though rarely, a culinary "fruit" is not a true fruit in the botanical sense. For example, rhubarb is often referred to as a fruit, because it is used to make sweet desserts such as pies, though only the petiole of the rhubarb plant is edible.^[7] In the culinary sense, a fruit is usually any sweet tasting plant product associated with seed(s), a vegetable is any savoury or less sweet plant product, and a nut any hard, oily, and shelled plant product.^[8]

Although a nut is a type of fruit, it is also a popular term for edible seeds, such as peanuts (which are actually a legume) and pistachios.^[9] Technically, a cereal grain is a fruit termed a caryopsis. However, the fruit wall is very thin and fused to the seed coat so almost all of the edible grain is actually a seed. Therefore, cereal grains, such as corn, wheat and rice are better considered edible seeds, although some references list them as fruits.^[10] Edible gymnosperms seeds are often misleadingly given fruit names, e.g. pine nuts, ginkgo nuts, and juniper berries.

Referency : wikipedia