August 2022: PEACH-Y KEEN DESSERTS
“There’s nothing like a perfect peach. I think there’s something really special and important about knowing that you can only have a peach for a very brief moment each year.”
— Alice Waters, American Masters
Torrential rains may have arrived to end the scorch of the summer heatwave that has attacked my tropical base of operations but the wet season has not stopped the influx of peaches crossing the Pacific from America. The presence of peaches during rainy days symbolizes one thing- the heart-shaped fruit deserves a shower of appreciation and love while availability lasts.
All 100 cultivars of peaches and nectarines, whose smooth skins in the latter are a product of a mutation of the fuzzy trait into a recessive gene, go by the scientific name Prunus persica and classify under the rose family Rosaceae with plums, cherries, apricots, and almonds as homologous cousins. Although the Linnean name suggests an Iranian heritage after an unproven claim of Alexander the Great encountering the fruit during his conquest, ancient China, located two kingdoms east of the Macedonian Empire, was ground zero for feral red peach trees with northwest Zhejiang villagers along the riverbanks of the Yangtze Basin being the first to domesticate and cultivate the plant for ornamental emblems of longevity and immortality.
Peaches diffused westward into Europe and stretched beyond the Atlantic through the present-day Balkan states. Its sweet taste and fleshy texture easily won the Greeks and Romans over that they took notice and cherished the priceless and fleeting beauty of the fruit brought by fragility and simultaneous ripening. Romans, in particular, would resort to pickling just so they could hang on to that glorious moment of visual perfection. Spanish conquistadors, possibly led by Hernando de Soto, introduced peaches to the Americas, becoming the second transoceanic invasive species after the pig. Having come full circle for the whole world to experience its presence and taste, the seasonal reign of peaches every summer is a natural phenomenon every fruit lover must anticipate and enjoy with gusto.
Peach-centered desserts that fully bring out the aesthetics and peak flavors of the fruit are, in every literal sense, peachy, which is why The Kitchen Scholar has selected a number of them for the entirety of August- simultaneously coinciding with the American National Peach Month. For the price of love the heart-shaped peach represents in its current commercial abundance, the featured recipes this month will require the right mix of enthusiasm, effort, patience, and discipline on behalf of the reader to establish a culinary and gastronomic rapport with. Not to mention, there is more than enough peachiness to share and spread around!
