Tantalus

I wish I could tell you I was biting into a peach right now. I thought I would be; my first tree's fruits will be ripe this weekend. But by Thursday, I'll be on an airplane headed to Africa, so I won't be harvesting them. Fortunately, I have the kind of friends who show up for me when the chips are down, so I can count on them to go up there and feast. And lest you suspect me of irony, I assure you that my gratitude for the appetites of friends is exceeded only by my thanks for the way they have carried my family and me through the last seven days. It's been a helluva week.

Last Monday, several weeks earlier than we expected to hear anything, and fast on the heels of a peach ice cream-enhanced dinner party I'd catered the night before and intended to blog about, we received word that we were to appear in a court in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to finalize the adoption of our new son. All kinds of paperwork, vaccinations and other preparations were, shall we say, pending. (I'm not going to excoriate myself here for any failures of organization.) A couple of days later, we learned that our 5-year old son, Gus, had a skull fracture that required surgery to avoid sending him into childhood and beyond with a dent on his forehead.

When should we do the surgery? Oh, tomorrow would be best.

A day and a night in the hospital and then home to all that needed to be done. And so my gratitude, my happy delegation of peach-picking duties, stems from a sense of karmic debt: so many of our friends have stepped in during this busy time to help out--playing with Gus while we've packed and run errands, donating supplies to the home that has sheltered our new son while he's waited for us, calling and stopping by just to check in. They deserve all the peaches they can eat.

Our friends at Abyssina Restaurant here in Memphis tell us it's mango season in Ethiopia. But I'll be glad to come home with my new baby boy so I can make him some homemade peach baby food and then write about it.

For a few weeks, now, peaches have been all around me, beckoning. But I've insisted on waiting for my peaches, from my trees. And now, I'll just have to wait again. I'm getting good at waiting--waiting almost 18 months for this little child, waiting for the doctors to come and tell us Gus's surgery went just fine.

So now it's your turn to wait. It'll be a couple of weeks before I write again. Don't go away, now. The peaches are coming.

Peaches and Cream

Yesterday morning I got a polite request for a new post from my excellent friend and most faithful reader, Cheryl. Please! I've been out of town and then swamped with my son's birthday party, farmers' market business, and other stuff you don't want to hear about. I'm not one of those intrepid bloggers who posts from her Blackberry--I'm a blogger who eats blackberries. However, it's nice to know someone is actually looking in on me from time to time. That said, it's time to get back in the saddle. At the Memphis Botanic Garden's farmers market yesterday I loaded up on blackberries, blueberries, beautiful summer squash, tomatoes, chiles, sweet onions, pecans, peaches, and bicolor zucchini so fresh it squeaks. Some of the tomatoes in these photos are actually from our garden, and I can't resist showing you my son Gus's first Patio tomato, grown on his own plant. The flavor is pretty good, considering that our deck doesn't get loads of light. Now, as I reported back in early June, local Derby peaches are available at the markets here in Memphis already. But in general, I've been abstaining until my peaches ripen. I emailed Henry Jones to see if my girls were ready yet, and he replied in sports similes: "They are bigger than golf balls, but smaller than baseballs. They are dark green. They should be ready in about 2 weeks."

So I'm sticking with berries for now, but I had to buy some peaches to make ice cream for a dinner I'm making on Sunday. My son's Montessori has a silent auction every year, and I did one of those dinner-for-8-in-your-own-home donations. I'll be serving chilled cucumber soup (made with buttermilk--finally some buttermilk in this blog!), tacos filled with carnitas or Pollo a la Brasa, and peach ice cream. So the peaches aren't for me. Although I'll have to do a little tasting. Seems like the right thing to do, doncha think? I'll post the ice cream as soon as I make it.

Meanwhile, I've been cleaning out the closets and trying to declutter. Intending to put it away in a box under my bed, I opened up a frayed little binder that's been sitting on a table in my bedroom.
It's my great-grandmother Verde Clark Graff's recipe book, filled with her tiny upright script (her handwriting has posture as good as hers was). In it, a peach recipe as pure and simple as you'd expect of a woman born in 1896, whose tastes arose from a midwestern small-town girlhood but whose domestic habits were forged in the crucible of the Great Depression. My great-grandfather was in the steel business, so my Gigi (short for great-grandmother) wasn't exactly facing deprivation, but her little book bespeaks an orderly thrift uncommon in our age of plentiful food and scarce time. (Of course, the era of plentiful commodities might be winding down now. It's heartening to read that so many more people are raising vegetable gardens this year, but discouraging to think that many of our neighbors who need affordable and accessible produce the most don't really have the time or resources to grow their own. The domestic habits of planning, cooking, and keeping records seem all but lost. Without those habits, feeding a family real home-grown or home-made food is difficult at best.)

By the time I knew her, Gigi was a rather fancy old lady, but I like to picture her sitting at her desk and writing out these recipes. I know I'm romanticizing it, but the activity seems so meditative and trusting. There is time, there will be time, it seems to say.

However, this peach recipe seems to be in a more hasty hand than some of her others. Reality is, the peaches are only in season for a couple of months.


Here is a direct transcription of the recipe from Gigi's notebook. I'll be testing it soon; I think we might need some clarifications for the modern cook, don't you? I'll have to look into what it'll mean for the syrup to snap, and we'll have to see if a bottle of cream is a pint. But peaches, butter, sugar and cream? How can we go wrong?

Peaches--Pauline Kellogg
8 large peaches
2 c. sugar
1/4 c. water
1/4 c. butter (size of a walnut)

Melt all--add fresh peaches. Cook in skillet covered with skillet. When peaches are tender, take out. Let syrup boil until it almost snaps. Pour in bottle of whipping cream (not whipped). Pour over fruit. Let get cold.

A Utopia of Peaches

Some years ago, my dad and stepmom gave me a charming framed botanical illustration of a Lizzie Peach for Christmas. (No one else does anymore, but they still call me Lizzy.) The print hangs on my dining room wall, unmarred by Bill's name. (Unfortunately, I'm not quite savvy enough to get a clean version of the print up here, but you can see her blushing sweetness anyway. ) I was looking at it the other day and thinking about the fact that there was a "Lizzie Peach." What other names might be out there?

So many names! So much imagination--not just mere descriptors, such as "Delicious" or "Redskin." The old names were personal, and eaters had personal relationships with their fruit. Imagine a world in which the supremacy of the peach could be defended on the grounds that to praise it is to “gild refined gold.” Now, imagine a society in which the following defense of the peach would be coherent to anyone but the most freaky-geeky foodies:

If any one doubts the precise rank which the peach should take among the different fruits of even that cornucopian month—September—and wishes to convince us of the higher flavor of a Seckel or a Belle Lucrative pear, we will promise to stop his mouth and his argument with a sunny-cheeked and melting ‘George the Fourth’ or luscious ‘Rareripe!’

This world existed once, right here in these glorious United States. But it was 108 years ago, when people got most of their sugar from fruit, I guess, and so devoted the same emotional energy to thinking about peaches and plums and grapes as we do to dreaming of--and naming--Twix Bars and Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk. To be fair, I found this encomium as I researched a bit of drupian history (drupes are the family to which peaches belong, and include almonds, apricots, cherries and plums) in the 1900 edition of Charles and Andrew Jackson Downing's The Fruits And Fruit Trees Of America: Or The Culture, Propagation And Management, In The Garden And Orchard, Of Fruit Trees Generally. So I guess they were writing for an audience of initiates. But still! Have you ever heard of a Belle Lucrative pear? If so, where can I find one? And a George the Fourth peach? Does it wear a powdered wig?

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The peach, at least, originated in China but came to the West via Iran, in the Near East. In fact, the name of the peach comes from Persia. (You have to try saying Persia with your mouth full of peach and smiling because it's so good for this to make much sense, but then you'll hear it.) Peaches made their American debut in 1680, and flourished here. In fact, according to the Downings, the States and China are the only countries where peaches are widely cultivated in open orchards (but maybe things have changed in the last 100 years?). Seems that they need our hot summers and chilly winters. (Elsewhere, as in Europe and the Northeast, they do well espaliered against walls, monastery-style.)

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We eat peach flesh, but the kernel can be used in a cordial called Noyau. If you can't get your hands on some Noyau and don't have the time to split some pits and distill some, you can steep the leaves in some other brandy and make a passing substitute. You can grow a tree from the pit, according to the Downings, but it's only advisable if you don't plan to espalier. In that case, better to use a dwarf rootstock, such as a plum.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So all parts of the noble peach are useful. In fact, to return to China and my friend Nancie's comment about the Chinese god of immortality, the Downings report that in east Asia the peach has had a status similar to the apple in Western myth: as a fruit with magical and sometimes dangerous power.

The traditions of a peach tree, the fruit of which conferred immortality, and which bore only once in a thousand years—and of another peach-tree of knowledge, which existed in the most remote period, on a mountain guarded by a thousand demons, the fruit of which produced death—are said to be distinctly preserved in some of the early Chinese writings. Whatever may have been the nature of these extraordinary trees, it is certain that, as Lord Bacon says, ‘not a slip or sucker has been left behind.’ We must therefore content ourselves with the delight which a fine peach of modern times affords to the palate and the eye.

Hear, hear.

A Faint Rumbling in the Distance

Yes, that sound you hear is the first of the Great Peaches of 2008 rolling towards a farmers' market near you. Or maybe it was the stampede of otherwise-reasonable people shoving each other aside to get at them. Last Saturday, Jones brought several dozen boxes of Derby peaches to the MFM. (A reminder to all readers: start posting those peach recipes now!) You could just feel the pent-up desire as word spread that they were there; the movement toward the north end of the market was almost unconscious. Must. Have. Peaches.

Of course, I've already written about last year's traumatic frost. No need to dwell on that! Nor on the near-miss we experienced this spring. But it hardly seems real that we already have mature stonefruit at the end of May. Up north, where I hail from, we don't get scratch (except strawberries) till at least June. My trees up at Jones won't bear till later--my earliest, the Harrow Beauties, in July. But the arrival of the Derbies sent me into a bit of a panic, so on Memorial Day, up to Jones I dashed.

My friends the Harpers and the Iveses came along with their kids. Little Anna and my son Gus collected baby peaches. They plan to found a museum on our front stoop.

Gus wandered into a fairyland zone of the orchard, where my heirloom Elberta tree is.

The last time we were up there, the peaches were tiny and the difference between the frost-stunted fruits and their healthy brethren was negligible. Now the runts stand out. The rains and heat have also encouraged the vetch and the leaves and the grasses; the place glowed green against a heavy sky. On this sultry day, the whole place felt enchanted.

We even found a peach-troll.

After we visited my trees, we went over to pick some more strawberries. Not that I needed any; I'd bought 4 quarts at the MFM on Saturday. But it's getting so that I feel ill at ease if I don't have to rearrange the condiments in the fridge to make room for berries. By the time we got over there, piled-up clouds were tumbling in and spattering us occasionally with big cooling drops. Just as we filled our buckets, thunder growled us off the field and we took refuge in the lunchroom adjacent to the Jones farmstand, just in time. As rain hammered on the tin roof, we reveled in pimento-cheese sandwiches, tender white beans and cornbread, and lemonade.

It was a perfect Memorial Day.

Country Honk

We had an open house kind of party on New Year's Day and without reflecting too deeply on my hubris (I guess if I had, I wouldn't have committed it), I bought a country ham at Schnuck's, the Memphis grocery store with some local cred. They stock several types, but I went for Tripp's, because I've been to their place and they were really nice. Oh, and the ham is great. Melissa Petersen wrote about it for the debut issue of Edible Memphis (where you can see some of my other writing) and held a fancy tasting, slicing it prosciutto-style and serving it with melon.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for the idea that we've got a ham here that can go hock-to-hock with the Italians. But I'm also committed to mastering the local idiom if at all possible, so for my New Year's fete I decided to serve it on biscuits. When in Rome, doncha know. Except it's Memphis.

Um, you're thinking, it's May. Why are you talking about January?

The January ham experiment was a debacle, that's why. My guests were too polite to say anything, but we had too much ham left over at the end of the day to spell success. Here's why: In order for country ham to be palatable, it either needs to be sliced paper-thin, or it requires a couple days of scrubbing, soaking and simmering to remove the mold and salt and render it tender enough to yield to your teeth at roughly the same rate as the bread product into which it is tucked. Otherwise, you get an awful result. You bite into a fluffy, tender biscuit (I did get that part right, thanks to White Lily), only to find yourself in a Brazilian jujitsu match with a slab of salty gristle as crumbs fly all over yourself and the nice new acquaintance you were making till just that moment. It just doesn't make good party food unless you tenderize it.

But I didn't have a dutch oven large enough for my country ham, so I took it back to Schnuck's, where they sliced it on a bandsaw--not an elegant meat slicer that would give me something I could pair with figs--and returned my ham to me in bone-in 1/2"-thick increments. As of now, at least 12 of these slabs remain in my freezer. Like Dr. Frankenstein, I've been experimenting on them ever since.

I had no technique in January, but I can now get one of these hunks to a point of toothsomeness and desalinization that will harmonize with a biscuit. After placing it in a pan of cool water, I bring it to a bare simmer for 20 minutes or so. But once I've done this, I have several other options. My son Gus tests most of them for me, since my husband doesn't eat the furry beasts. So the other night when Josh was out, after rummaging through the fridge for something to eat, I found a bunch of broccoli rabe from Keith and Jill Forrester's stall at the MFM. Grabbing a hunk of ham, I decided to work the Tennessee-Italy connection in reverse.
4 cloves sliced garlic sauteed in olive oil, then chunky matchsticks of ham, probably a few ounces tops. (Country ham is smoky and salty even after soaking, so the best sub if you don't have any will still be prosciutto.) I like to parboil my rabe before chopping it, so I dropped it into boiling salted water for a few minutes and pulled it out with my tongs once the stalks were tender. After plunging it in cool water and chopping it, I added it to the saute and got it good and tasty. Meanwhile, I augmented the cooking water and returned it to a boil, then tossed in a half box of mini penne and a handful more salt. I reserved a little cooking water and used it to bind the sauce to the macaroni, and was all set. This didn't even want cheese.

It appears to have been a success. Note the glazed eyes, the wanton abandon with which he shovels the food into his maw.
And now, behold the noodle fiend, his passion spent. Nothing pleases a mom quite so well as a child with a full stomach and a vacant gaze. The olive-oil slick about the mouth is lagniappe.

Peachy Friends and Aunties

Once my blog was shipshape, as many of you know I emailed lots of friends and relatives to announce its debut. One of my favorite responses came from my friend Nancie McDermott (whom I met at the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Foodwriters), mistress of many idioms and genius author of Southern Cakes and Real Thai. She balks at posting comments, claiming a lack of tech savvy. I'm giving her a pass on this one, since this is such great lore. To wit:

Do you know that peaches are very auspicious and prized in Chinese cultural tradition; not sure exactly why, but the 'god' of longevity, the guy in robes with the gigantic forehead, bald, is shown with a peach in his hand and little children crawling playfully all over him. He's often pictured on boxes of dried noodles, because they are also longevity symbols, long strands mean long life and you eat noodles on your birthday.

No noodles in this picture (that I found at Pinn-Stitch), but the requisite peach and some kids.

Evidence that the dream lives on (cribbed from View Images):


After sending me on the trail of the Longevity God, Nancie dropped another tantalizing tidbit (Nancie, if you're reading this, now you know we're all counting on you): "Peach cobbler will come your way sometime this summer. Recipe that is, pretty messy to mail."

Something for us all to look forward to.

My clever and worldly Aunt Anita has also responded, with characteristic alacrity, to my call for peach recipes. I'm a lousy niece, seldom writing and often forgetting to say thanks. So I'm attempting to make amends here by for once responding to one of her gestures of kindness and inclusion. It's a start, and everyone benefits.

Anita also hesitates to comment on blogs, and so dished this family peach tradition via email. (Note to civilians: Gogo was my paternal grandfather.)

First of all, you should know that you come by this peach thing genetically. Gogo's parents evidently were big peach fans. Seems to me that 'peachy' was one of my grandfather's (AKA 'Gramp') favorite expressions. AND when I went away to summer camp at age 9, I got a postcard from him which was quite unusual. It was a piece of soft leather, with a picture of a fruit on it. It said 'You are a (picture of a fruit).' Not being a habitual fuzzy fruit eater, this fruit did not occur to me. I kept looking at the picture, and asking myself -- 'What am I supposed to be? an apple? an orange?'

So Aunt Anita didn't quite recognize the peach and still doesn't know why calling someone a peach is a high-order form of flattery. Do we really need to explain? Is not the peach, at its peak of voluptuous ripeness, the empress of all fruits?

My aunt didn't stop there, however.

The second connection is a recipe I have which I would be happy to share with you. It is for peach cake. Gogo wrote it down for me. It was one of his mother's recipes-- the ONLY recipe I have from her. In fact, I didn't know she even knew how to cook. As you know, she died shortly before your father was born." [I didn't know!] "So neither of us knew her. I think she was a bossy busy body and a nervous nelly from what I have heard. But she did have a good peach cake recipe. Actually, she called it 'peach pudding.'

Apologies to all who seek to defend my great-grandmother's reputation. However, if this peach cake recipe is any good, we'll issue a retroactive amnesty on all her nervous or bossy behavior.

We should have our first peaches here in Tennessee in a few weeks, so I can't vet this recipe yet. And so, for all to test and modernize in the next couple of months, here is Schenck's Old-School Brooklyn Peach Pudding.


PEACH PUDDING Serves 4-6 Source: Anita M.S. Schenck

Combine 1 1⁄2 T. butter, 1 1⁄2 cp powdered sugar
Add 3 beaten egg yolks
1/3 cp milk
1 1⁄2 cp flour*
Then 3 beaten egg whites
Lastly 1 1⁄2 tsp. baking powder
Stir together, then fold in c. 3 sliced peaches and turn into a 1 qt baking dish
Bake in a slow oven 45-60 min.
Serve with whipped or ice cream.

ENJOY!!

(*you might want to add 1 tsp vanilla, + 1⁄4 tsp salt—AZ’s note)

Green Day

A couple of weeks ago, the strawberries made great jam but not such great snacks. By this Saturday morning, after a good dose of sun, the berries at the Farmers' Market had ripened red and sweet to the core and were perfuming the entire south end of the arcade. I staggered home with a bag full of loot: fresh goat cheese from Bonnie Blue, chicken and Berkshire pork butt from West Wind Farms, broccoli rabe from Whitton Farms, and strawberries from Jones. I already had some arugula from Wednesday's market at the Botanic Garden, so when I got home I made myself a Southern lady lunch. First, a tasty fresh-from-the market salad. Arugula tossed with olive oil and salt, then finished with a recent find, Steen's cane vinegar. Its fruity smell reminds me of sherry vinegar, but it's got amazing caramel notes, too. Perfect for a salad like this one, topped with goat cheese and strawberries. A radish sandwich on some soft white bread rounded out my plate. Mmm.