Oh the brilliant peach. Ripe and plump, the peach can be virgin like purity cloaked in a temperature sensitive skin. Precious and untouched as it hangs from an unassuming protective tree blushing, the peach hides a soft and aromatic flesh that loves you back once you bring her on down. Possibly the forbidden offspring of royalty in my mind though sadly, the peach is rarely found in the perfection it should be. Russ Parsons made note of this as a reflection of our entire food system's lack of "seasonability" in How to Pick a Peach. We are eating the idea of a peach usually if we buy it in the winter from produce bins across the country. Worst yet is the fact that peaches take very well to be laced with sugar and canned. When buying them in Alabama at road stand during July once I was reminded of what a real peach was. In season, born in the correct region, I was smitten and ate four in the car while driving home.
A bowl full of napping peaches is sitting on my table as we speak. Every time I enter my apartment I am greeted with the sweet perfumed air, which feels much too southern and hospitable for my Brooklyn apartment. My weakness for peaches is much like that of other summer berries that starts with me stumbling upon something amazing during youth and never turning back. Peaches though, are less noble. The only peaches I liked growing up were on the Shoney's buffet, bobbing up and down amidst the slimy can syrup. I usually did not eat them, choosing fresh strawberries and a few hundred packets of sugar, but they looked like they were worth eating as they Day-Glo oranged' at me from their plastic square trough next to the melon slices and marshmallow salad. I would fish one or two out, gum them down in the two to three bites that would display the mealy texture of their naked little bodies. Looking at them from what was almost eye level for me at the buffet then, I remember the peaches looking sad. Today I them in their generic buffet bin like a sad war torn village, some curling up in shame and others spread out in lifeless bodies of what used to be a fruit. Not the only fruit to suffer this fact of big business and mass production, the peach seems to tug on my heart strings the most.
Years began to pass and my mother gave up on that buffet and I again found solace at the Country Club Sunday buffet. (I might just have to stop here and acknowledge my buffet wisdom. This was not planned and I should probably write a long dissection of buffets measured in trips through the lines, long handled spoons and stately presentations at some functions.) There I learned of the peach in a more tasteful, yet just as sugary way. Cobbler. Rich with peaches cobbler; eaten with plenty of crust, off a dinner plate, warm and gooey. Many a day I would nibble a salad, pick at some broccoli, then dive into a platter of peach cobbler. The bowl of peaches I have today might see that fate if I can muster up enough courage to cut them up and lose that late summer smell in their lusty skins. How cruel it would be though to not share my peaches by making cobbler in a big dish, pulling it out of the oven only to see that I would be eating it alone. It does not much transport well and loses the perfect balance of loose to chunky filling that sigh-s as you dig into it instead of gushing all over the plate or sticking so tightly together that you wonder if the crust would have survived just being set over firm jam instead. Chilling cobbler makes for a soggy bottomed dough that dries out on top, and a filling that can chill and congeal to that square school cafeterias have long cut into wedges and called pie. With the cobbler love and dilemma on my hands, no extra jars for making jam and little to no one to share a pie with, what was I do to. It is August, I have achieved the perfect peaches in the right season and am selfishly not wanting to take them further into enjoyment.
The peaches sat until in a whirl of peach scented urgency I grabbed the bowl and started slicing them away to make a quick jam. A texture soft and serene, I sliced them all into a stock pot, juiced a lemon into the mix and poured in cane sugar. The concept of adding equal parts of fruit and sugar to jam destroys my clean conscious when I will later eat this jam with a spoon from straight from the jar, making me keep a conservative hand with the sugar scoop. Sugar does help preserve things so it must be there, serving as thickening gel as well as I throw rules to the wind and add no pectin to the boiling jam. Which became more of chunky preserves than jam. This was the only answer I thought as I tilted my head down and kept slicing. Keeping them to sit and cough out their last few breathes of life in a bowl for my selfish olfactory enjoyment would be doing a disservice to the peaches. They wait all season to make their debut and upstage the just passed crop of berries. With most only knowing peaches in the way I grew up knowing them, a true peach wants and needs to be loved. Admire my beauty, smell my untouched scent and eat me right off the tree as my fuzz gets all over your hands, the peach would say to those naysayer who want nothing more than a fruit cup of little peach cubes. Taste me and know what a peach is supposed to taste like it.
Though I did not personally talk to the peaches, I know that is what they say. Walking through a peach field in that small Alabama town with the stand, it was whispered through the rows. People have to start listening to real food; to good food that needs to me valued. More people would like fruits and vegetables if they were the ones grown from clean deep soil, harvested at the correct time when ripe and full of flavor undeveloped by GMOs or other science absurdities. Into a peach James crawled, and I think I would do the same if in the name of a higher find. Peach flesh messy on my hands and knees, juice dripping all about, it would not be in vain but a crawl to fight for peaches. To fight for all food raped by industrialization really, but first to let the peach stand and speak as an ambassador for fruits. I know a committee of tomatoes and the board for better roots and tubers would not be far behind. Lettuces would stage a protest stomping all the plastic bags that have left them tasteless and rotting in their own liquids.
Staring at my jars of peach preserves last night, I wondered if they were happy in there. Should I have sat down with a kitchen towel draped over my lap and eaten them all? Should I have invited friends over, tossed the peaches with mint or rosemary and served them with grilled chicken? Ultimately the peaches seemed satisfied that they were valued, elevated to the status they deserved. Glass jarred and in my full cabinets is a much more proper burial than the Shoney's buffet of yesterday. Before summer escapes us, or at some point, find yourself a local peach or any fruit in the right place, during the right time, and birthed by the right process.
"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring and because it has fresh peaches in it" — Thomas Walker
