You misunderstand. I was not trying to pass arguments after the dispatch table was defined. I was trying to pass arguments predefined in the dispatch table. In the example I gave $fruit was the argument. If I use \&add_entry( $fruit ), perl will run add_entry( $fruit ) immediately and return a reference to it's return. But $fruit might change before add_entry is dispatched or between dispatched calls. The point was to define the arguments in the table not afterward.

The problem was that this solution is skipped in the dipatch table examples I found online and in books. Some examples intimated that passing arguments from the table was difficult. I found the answer so easy, I thought I had missed something.