Nostalgia

I made the mistake last week of buying four large peaches (for the modest sum of £2) from a stall in Epsom Market which I should have remembered went in for cheap, showy and not very satisfactory fruit. In this case the peaches were ripe enough and the first one was quite eatable, but I decided that the remainder would be better cooked.

Part of this was a wave of fruity nostalgia. When I was a child, we used to bottle lots of fruit from the garden: apples, pears, plums, cherries, gooseberries, raspberries and peaches. I expect that blackcurrants were considered a bit strong for bottling and that they mostly went for blackcurrant jelly - something I was partial to as a child - and a format which avoided a lot of tedious preparation. Buying in was not thought of. Huge consumption of preserving sugar, in those days somewhat cheaper than the ordinary sort, and coming in sturdy brown rather than flimsy white bags.

The peaches were a white fleshed peach, especially bred for the English climate, and when they were good they were very good indeed. The only catch was that this tree swung between glut and nothing much at all. Bottling was one answer to glut, although a rather labour intensive process involving peeling and stoning the peaches - with, from a child's point of view - a very large number of peaches being needed to fill the sort of kilner jar that we used. But the product was again very good indeed, almost as good, although rather different, as fresh. And quite different from the yellow peach segments one commonly gets in tins.

The tree was probably the Peregrine featured at reference 1. A variety which must have been self fertile as we only had the one peach tree. I don't think we used to net it, although we did net the nearby morello cherry tree which was rather bigger. Black fishing nets from Lowestoft, nets which at that time I was able to mend with the approved knots. Note: do not be misled by google: morello cherries are good for both eating and cooking.

First step peel the peaches. If one has a peach in top condition it is possible to just pull the skin off with a small knife; with these peaches it was more a matter of peeling them like an apple or a potato. But they were large enough that this worked OK. The trick was to cut them in half before peeling, just twisting to separate the two halves - that way the removal of the stone and the cutting of each half into four segments did not result in peach mush.

Second step boil up two ounces of sugar in about three quarters of a pint of water, in a saucepan big enough that the peaches would just fit in a single layer.

Add peach segments and simmer for around 8 minutes.

Leave to cool to room temperature and eat. Not bad, somewhere between the bottled peaches of childhood and the tinned peaches of sainsbury.

PS: do not put stewed fruit in the refrigerator. They might keep longer there but, to my mind, destructive of taste and texture.

Reference 1: http://www.unwins.co.uk/peach-tree-peregrine-pid2567.html.