A Return to Form: the Pickle Edition

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It's been one year, three weeks, and two days since my last post.


It seems that after a hasty sign-off, I promised to return with tales of canning and pie-making. Gus was having cranial surgery and our then 6-month-old, Solly, was waiting for us in Ethiopia. I thought I'd be back when the fuss died down.  I guess the fuss lasted longer than I'd planned.

There are certainly parents, writers, bloggers out there who can change diapers and cook and post promptly. I ain't one. We got home from Africa and the peaches couldn't wait--we scooted up to Jones Orchard every couple of weeks for the rest of the summer, till the last fuzzy nubbin was plucked. Solly lay on a mat, gazing up through the branches, and I like to think that this introduction to America can explain part of his sunny disposition.

We peeled their skins (a nude peach is as beautiful as a baby's naked bottom), then canned, pickled, and stewed them.

We roasted them with lemon, honey and thyme, and just ate them out of hand. We made cobbler and pie.


My husband Josh even managed to pick up a wicked rash up and down his inner arms and legs by snuggling a poison ivy-swaddled peach tree.

But blogging was beyond my strength. Between processing all this food and bonding with our energetic new baby--who swiftly phased into a kinetic crawler, then a gonzo toddler--I had only enough energy left over to stagger to bed. And then stagger back out to get a bottle and rock Solly back to sleep.

Lately, though, Solly's learned to snooze the night away. He's in a toddler program at the same Montessori as Gus--so I'm back in the saddle. And I've got news.

Pickled okra.
Okra pickles show up at parties and picnics here in Memphis sometimes, but apparently they're not universally savored. Leaving the Kroger with a case of Ball jars the other day, I got a curious look from a friendly lady shopping with her son. "You doing some canning?" she asked me. "Okra!" I said brightly, assuming that a native Memphian would cotton (sorry--couldn't resist) to the idea of a Yankee like me falling under the sway of such a idiosyncratically Southern foodstuff.

Instead, her sweet brown face squinched up. "Ergh." Her son's followed suit. "You eat that stuff?" Oh, well. So much for my stereotypes about Southerners.

Gus, on the other hand, loves the stuff. His schoolmate Dantz has it every day in his lunchbox, I was enviously told. Well, I'm not going to let any kid have a better lunchbox vegetable than mine. So Gus and I have been hitting the MFM, buying big bags of okra and smaller piles of Thai chiles. Following a recipe from the Lee Bros. cookbook, we've cured them in a brine of dill and spices and garlic. Mmm. Tasty crunchy goodness.

These little spears are great in a picnic with hard-boiled eggs--or better yet, alongside curried egg-salad sandwiches, with some Bedekar's Lime Pickle on the side for added zing. We've also paired them with Gus's Fried Chicken. I even did a few jars of mixed okra and green beans. Fantastic.

I'm on the verge of getting myself a proper pickle-centric cookbook, but till then I've been relying on the combined counsel of the aforementioned Lee Bros. and the almost-infallible Rombauer and Becker. Below is the basic recipe, without a canning primer. You can find all that yourself.

(By the way, you don't need to tell me that all this pickling is just a desperate subliminal bid for some kind of Southern authenticity--trying to out-Delta the locals, or whatever. Bear with me. At least I haven't taken up the harmonica.)


Pickled Peaches
adapted from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook
Enough for 2 qt.-sized jars, easily doubled
4 lb. small, firm peaches
2 lb. sugar (yes!)
2 c. cider vinegar
2 sticks cinnamon
1 T whole cloves
1 heaping t finely chopped crystallized ginger (I subbed 1T each peppercorns and cardamom pods, to good effect)

1. Check whether your peaches are too large to fit through your jars' mouths. If they are, you'll cut them in half after you skin them.
2. Fill a sink or large pot/bowl with ice water. Set another big pot of water to boil and sterilize your jars.
3. Score the bottom of each peach with a little "X". This will make them easier to peel. After you remove your jars from the boiling water, using the same water, plunge each peach in for a minute, then move with tongs into the ice water. After peeling (and halving, if necessary) each peach, place it in a bowl.
4. Clean that big pot and then bring to a boil all remaining ingredients in it with any peach juice that has collected in the bowl. Boil gently for 20 minutes until you have a concentrated syrup.
5. Poach the peaches, about a pound at a time, in the syrup for 8 minutes. Roll them around in the syrup so they cook evenly. Repeat until all peaches have been poached and gently placed in sterilized jars.
6. Carefully ladle hot syrup into jars up to 1/2" below rims. Seal with lids, and process if you plan to keep them longer than 4 weeks in the fridge. (I processed mine and gave them as gifts. They make a great substitute for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving, or if you give them out for Christmas, they're amazing with New Year's Day ham.)


Pickled Okra
This is remarkable easy. Also from the Lees, also relatively easy to double or even triple.
1 1/2 lb. okra or mixed okra and green beans (look for pods small enough to fit in your jars)
1 qt plus 1 1/2 cups water
1 T plus 2 t kosher salt
2 dried hot chiles (actually, I used fresh, and it was fine)
4 sprigs fresh dill
4 large cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
4 c. distilled white vinegar (the kind made from grain) or cider vinegar
2 t sugar
1/2 t peppercorns (see below for add'l. spice ideas)

1. Sterilize your jars (see above or read up on canning).
2. Trim the woody ends of the okra's stems, but don't cut into the pods. Dissolve 1T salt in 1 qt water and soak the okra for a couple hours, covered, in a cool place.
3. After the soak, put a big pot on the stove with the vinegar, remaining 1 1/2 c water and 2 t salt, sugar, and peppercorns. (I did a batch with coriander and mustard seeds, too. That worked out well.)
4. Meanwhile, drain, rinse, and dry the pods. Preferably with clean tongs, place a chile, a dill sprig, and 2 garlic cloves in each jar.
5. When the brine boils, let it simmer for 4 minutes. Then ladle it, using a canning funnel if necessary, into jars, leaving 1/4" at the top (the okra will soak up some of the brine). Seal and process, or seal and turn upside down, storing in the fridge for up to 4 weeks.

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.

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)

God Bless the Child

Well, tonight's is a kwik-e post, since I spent all my allotted blog time diddling with the photo in my header. Now you're seeing some preadolescent peaches up there, and aren't they purdy? When I drove up to the orchard last week, Mr. Jones, Sr. showed me the difference between a young peach that had frost damage and one that didn't. Look closely:

Can you see the center, where the pit will form? Even though the fruity part around it looks healthy, the pit is blighted.

Now here's a baby that was higher up on the tree, and therefore above the pool of cold air that settled into this valley that night:




One thing that I learned is that these sterile fruits will ripen anyway--I think they call them nubs but I'll check because I might have made that up--and they get really super sweet. People make jam out of them. Guess what I'll be writing about in August?

Speaking of jam, I've been making jam like crazy this past week after picking strawberries at Jones and also buying them from the Windermere folks and Jones at the MFM and also (dear God stop me) buying some great Mississippi berries at Easy-Way. I'm using the recipe from Russ Parsons' How to Pick a Peach, which I'm pretty sure you'll be hearing about again. You take equal weights of cleaned, trimmed and halved berries and sugar--2 lb. each--and simmer them with a pinch of salt till the sugar is dissolved and the juice is clear, no longer. Add the juice of a lemon or an orange and let this fragrant mess sit overnight. The next day, boil it in 2-cup batches, looking each time for the berry juice to hit the sheeting stage, when it runs off a spatula in a few shiny rivulets rather than one. Or you can put a plate in the freezer for 10 minutes before and then, when you think your jam is done, drip a drop onto the plate. If it doesn't really run, your preserves are ready.

You can just stick this in jars in the fridge and give it to all your friends right away, but I went canning crazy and put it up. (Family members, pretend you didn't see this when Christmas comes!) The jam (RP points put it's technically preserves, since it doesn't have enough sugar!?!) is almost syrupy but has an amazingly bright and fresh strawberry flavor because it doesn't get cooked to kingdom come. Good on yogurt and ice cream, too.