Shelf Life#2: How to kill with cherry pie

Kate Lebo's glorious book about fruit we love, hate and sometimes fear

What do you get when you cross a baker with a poet and beautiful essayist? The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo. It was published in 2021, but I’ve only just discovered this delicious volume, and so glad I did. Increasingly, I’m reaching for books that I can dip into, and by that I mean, those designed to enjoy small bites of. Lebo has arranged hers so that each chapter is a fruit, which makes it perfect for enjoying and digesting one sweet serving at a time.

It’s almost an encyclopedia of strangeness; the fruits she explores are all troublesome in some way. There’s a section on how to kill someone with cherry pie, how to make lip balm with Durian (the fruit so stinky it’s banned in public places in some parts of the world), the relentless tartness of gooseberries, how she no longer eats kiwi fruit (because her mum had quite a particlar way of cutting away the rough brown peel and she’s no longer around to do it). You get the picture.

She weaves morsels of memoir between botanical insights, history, folkore and more. There are some brilliant recipes: blackberry shrub, yuzu marmalade, huckleberry pie. And she writes like a well-informed, rebellious and very funny angel. Highly recommend.