FRUIT SPECIAL: PEACH

FRUIT SPECIAL:  PEACH

They may have been overshadowed by mangoes in India, but peaches are delectable in their own right

 Pity poor peaches. Across much of the world, peaches and nectarines (their smooth-skinned variants) are celebrated as the most gloriously succulent of summer fruits. "Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - Good God, how fine," wrote John Keats in a letter. "It went down, soft pulpy, slushy, oozy - all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beautiful Strawberry. I shall certainly breed."
    In The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, Edward Schafer's study of the exotic foods of 7th century China, the peaches of the title were sent as tribute to the T'ang Emperor, and found such favour for their size, sweetness and colour that the Emperor decreed they be planted in all his parks, to become the most sought-after of Imperial fruit. Alexander the Great is said to have brought peaches from their Central Asian homeland to Europe. A French gardener who had bred a particularly fine type and who needed a royal favour sent baskets anonymously to Louis XIV who so loved them that, when the gardener revealed his identity, immediately granted what he wanted, as long as the peach supplies didn't stop.
    But India remains relatively indifferent to the pleasures of peaches. They ripen in the hills, to come at the end of summer, but this means they arrive when we are already satiated with mangoes, fruits similar to peaches in some ways. Both come in beautifully rounded and golden-red forms and are sweet and juicy, with firm, yet yielding flesh. Both seem to easily evoke erotic thoughts: Indian literature is full of references to breasts like mangoes, but the cleft shape of peaches evokes more fundamental imagery. Several writers during the Raj noted that Pashtun warriors had a favourite marching song called Zakhmi Dil which includes the lines: "There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach/ But alas I cannot swim."
    Yet despite superficial similarities, the personalities of mangoes and peaches are quite distinct. Mangoes are divas, offering a heady aroma and show-stopping intensity of flavour, their sweetness highlighted by lingering acid notes of green mango. Peaches are more modestly sweet, with a rounded fruity sourness. Their scent is gentle and while they do have interesting spicy notes, it is easy to overlook them when you've just been experiencing the pyrotechnics of perfectly ripe mangoes. In a tropical country like India, peaches can seem out of place. But they've been around, at least in North India, for quite a while. Peach cultivation was perfected in China, and Schafer notes that the great traveller Hsuan-tsang found them being grown in India under the name 'cinani', or 'from China'.
    Nobody seems to have bothered much to improve Indian peaches. Yet, neglected and inadequate as they are, even these peaches possess one secret way in which they are better than mangoes. Perhaps it is part of being a diva, but mangoes really do not take well to being eaten in any way except entirely alone. Cooking mangoes, except in the most minimal way, like juicing them for aamras, rarely works. Mango jam, for example, is more annoying than good, since mainly it reminds you
of how much better the uncooked mangoes it was made from would have been.
    Peaches, by contrast, cook very well. Peach jams and preserves are wonderful, and are oddly rare in India, though Women's India Trust in Mumbai makes a decent jam. The sugar needed to preserve them takes care of their unpredictable sweetness, and adding spices brings out their spicy notes. "Peach is perhaps the most perfect fruit for making jam: sweet, yet firm; the golden flesh turning to a darker burnt-orange with cooking," writes the popular novelist Joanne Harris in her recent book Peaches for Monsieur le Curé.
    The method that Harris gives in the book is designed to prevent the full flavour of peaches from being drowned in excessive sugar. The halved peaches with pits removed are cooked briefly with an equal weight of sugar, some cinnamon and pectin to help the jam set. The peach pieces, she writes, should be crushed a little with the sugar, to release their aroma and flavour. Then they are left overnight and cooked again briefly the next day, and that's it. This is probably best kept in the fridge, but it sounds delicious, and I am looking forward to trying it with this year's peaches.
    Canned peaches are usually good, the fruit suffering less in the canning than most other fruits. One excellent indulgence is to stuff canned halves with the slightly salty sour cream that's being produced under the Impero name from Haryana; the combination of sweet, salty, sour and creamy is just great. Peaches, in fact, combine well with any kind of dairy produce, even really strong tasting cheeses. This is another way they score over mangoes - the latter combine well with only a few other foods, but peaches are sociable and pair well with other fruits, dairy, nuts (particularly almonds, which are close cousins) and spices.
    Peaches also combine well with wine, whether consumed fresh or cooked. It harmonises with a fruity red wine and complements an acid white wine, while white peach pulp blends with sparkling wine in Bellinis to make one of the best wine-based drinks. But perhaps my favourite peach recipe, which I try to make every year, is peaches in brandy. All you need to do is skin the peaches (dunking them very briefly in hot water makes this easy), halve and stone them and then put them in a big jar along with some sugar and a few cloves or cinnamon sticks.
    When the jar is full just pour in brandy to cover, making sure that no fruit is left floating (weigh them down with a small katori filled with more brandy) or keep it in the fridge to prevent any fungus forming. Every now and then give the jar a good shake and leave it for a few weeks, or even months, if you can resist the temptation. The peaches gain a spirited kick which is wonderful combined with plain vanilla ice-cream, while the brandy takes on a lovely freshtasting fruitiness that is good by itself, or as a flavouring in desserts. Peaches may always have to play second-fiddle to mangoes in India, but in a few ways like this their happy harmonies can be heard undimmed.

Vikram Doctor CDET120720