I go a little crazy when peaches are in season, which in North Florida is between the middle of June and the middle of August. We're a 45 minute drive from Georgia, which is the center of the peach universe. The best of the best is the Elberta peach, which is like biting into everything the world promised you but snatched away until the moment when that golden flesh hits your tongue and the juice is running down your arms. Standing over the kitchen sink is the preferred position during the week or so that Elbertas are released by the Peach Gods into the mortal realm.
After this experience, then I start thinking about how to preserve some of the peaches for the winter. Peach jam is a must. Not only is it good with toast and jam, but if you slice some jalapenos in a jar or two then you can add it to a cheese board. I also make a white-peach saffron confiture, which is a looser French jam. White peach and lemon verbena is also a great combination.
But peaches this beautiful deserve to be put into a tart. I started with a riff on the Patricia Wells' Apricot Almond Tart, substituting peaches for the apricots. It's a divine tart not matter what fruit you use. This is a photo of the tart before it goes into the oven.
https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800
The perfection of the Elberta is expressed in all its golden glory! The Wells tart recipe is wonderful, but this year I wanted to try another one--Amanda Hesser's recipe. It is very different from Wells' recipe, but it is wonderful in its own way. The photograph at the beginning of this piece is Hesser's Fresh Peach Tart: https://food52.com/recipes/14217-peach-tart
Another peachy tart that is beautiful and delicious is this white peach tart. The White Peach is in the markets here around the beginning to the middle of August. This tart needs peach jam, and lucky for me I had some fresh jam that I'd made in July. I use the Tartine recipe, which calls for peaches, sugar, and lemon juice. It's a simple perfect recipe.
The perfume of a white peach is like a whiff of paradise, not the Old Testament one but the land of milk and honey in which everyone is illuminated by an inner light and poetry is on their tongues. This is an Italian recipe, and when I saw it, I knew I had to try it if only to be faithful to my peach-mania. https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/white-peach-tart
I'll leave you with this poem from my new book, Holoholo. Even when I'm in the middle of summer with its abundance of peaches, I am thinking of their passing from this world:
Ode to the Last Peach of Summer
How many summers are left me, fierce afternoons in July
as I bite into globes of ripe peaches, juice running
down my hands, the aching splendor of their golden flesh,
some as big as a baby’s head with its fuzz
and tender skin, but always I’m thinking of you, the last peach
of the year, sometimes in September, one year
on October fifth, and you're a little hard, my sweet nut,
or mealy, the rough fabric of your meat, its scent
a faint telegraph from August when I’m wallowing
in so many peaches I bake pies, make peach jam,
some with jalapeños, pour Bellinis, but with every bite
I get a little closer to you, and November looms
with its desperate peachless days. O pit with crevices
like the dark side of the moon. Juice exploding
on my tongue. Flesh of your flesh. O to live in a world
that has peaches, a moment or two in the riot of summer
before rain begins to fall, and in the dark woods mushrooms
sprout like gold coins in the last grass of the year.
_____
Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here.
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