The Best Peaches They'd Ever Eaten

My parents returned recently from a trip to Italy. They went to Siena for the famous horse race, the Palio di Siena. Then they went on to Florence. When they returned all I wanted to know was how the food was. The answer surprised me. Instead of hearing about how they’d had great steak in Florence they both told me that they’d had the best peaches they’d ever eaten.

This puzzled me. Why would you need to fly across the Atlantic to find a great peach when we have such good fruit right here at home? Then I was reading a piece over at Ed Levine Eats about white apricots and I was reminded of the answer. Consider this from John Seabrook’s 2002 New Yorker article on David Karp, the Fruit Detective:

“Most food writing is about cooking--it's less about the ingredients than about the rendering of those ingredients, and the consuming of them in communal settings. Karp is interested in the primal act of tasting--eating fruit right from the tree, vine, or bush. ("I'm not a foodie," he says. "I'm a fruitie.") His goal is sensual pleasure, but he has a rarefied idea of what fruit should taste like. The particular kind of taste he's after is one that the nineteenth-century writers on fruit described as "high flavor"--a fecund, almost gamy taste that, according to Karp, has been all but lost as fruits have been bred for mass production and long-distance shipping. "High flavor is the flavor of a pheasant, hung until high," he said. "You bite into the fruit, you taste the sugar, the texture, the acidity, and there's an almost overpowering aroma. That's what fruit should taste like. But Americans don't know that, because most of the fruit we eat is trash fruit." A real peach, allowed to ripen on the tree, is too fragile to withstand the rigors of a cross-country journey by truck or train, and so breeders have created low-acid, high-sugar peaches, which can be picked when they're still very hard but still taste sort of sweet.”

I remember reading this article when it first came out and I thank Ed Levine for the link that let me re-read it. I recommend the article both for the subject and the writing.

I was at the farmer’s market today in Madison. I was looking for locally grown peaches. There were some that had a sweet smell but were hard as rocks. Maybe in a week or two they’ll be ready to eat. If anyone has a tip on where to find great locally grown fruit I’d love to hear about it.