A paean to the peach

This is my favourite time of year. I love the sun, the heat and all the greenery but most of all I love the abundance of fresh fruit. You see, I’m one of those people that the Canada food guide was written for. On any given day I actually do manage to consume five to seven servings of fruit and vegetables. So this is my season.

I come by this naturally since I grew up in the Niagara peninsula where I spent a lot of my childhood planting, pruning and picking everything from pears to plums. As soon as you could carry a basket you were enlisted into the army of summer fruit harvesters. Mind you I did draw the line at strawberries. It’s a fruit that I enjoy immensely and find it hard to get enough of when in season but I WON’T pick them.

Thanks to modern refrigeration and more efficient shipping methods Canadians are lucky enough to have an incredible variety of produce available year-round. Where once we had to be content with locally grown pears, apples and melons once a year, today we have our pick of bananas, pineapples, kiwis and a dozen other ‘exotic’ fruit that our great-grand parents could only dream of. There are, I admit, unfortunate environmental consequences to this abundance but that’s for another column.

An early rule of thumb was that you ate what you picked. First it was the cherries, red, white, sweet and sour. Picking them earned you 15 cents a six quart-basket. This did not include, however, the entire basket that I would manage to consume during the course of the day. It was consider a rural version of the office perk. Plums followed soon after. Dark purple and juicy, most of them were destined to become prunes which has always

seemed to me a tragic misuse of this delicious fruit. I saved as many of them as I could from that ignoble fate by eating them in abundance as I picked.

By the time late summer and early fall rolled around we were into apple and pear season. Again, it was pick-andmunch time. I still believe that there is probably very little that can match a crisp, fresh apple right from the tree. Oddly enough, I also developed a taste for pears that were slightly under ripe and crunched when you bit into them. Today these very same pears and apples and a dozen other varieties are available year-round at the local grocery market.

Now, the observant reader will note that I jumped right from plums to apples and skipped much of mid summer. This was deliberate since it has always been my motto to save the best for last and the best in this case is undoubtedly the peach. Particularly the Niagara peach.

The Niagara peach is without peer. Neither the Okanagan valley nor the red soil of Georgia can produce anything to compare. This is not merely the chauvinistic rant of someone born in the shadow of the escarpment. It is a simple fact based on a lifetime of consumption. I make this claim as an individual who has been known to eat an entire basket of God’s gift to mankind in one sitting. I have eaten them fresh, baked, canned and caramelized. I have had them in pies, with ice cream and floating in a vodka cocktail. There is no room for doubt.

Some of you are probably already taking exception to my claim but that is likely because you have never had a ripe Niagara peach fresh from the tree. The peaches available locally were picked and packed well before they were fully ripe in order to survive the lengthy and time-consuming journey to our local Provigo, Metro or Maxi. As a result, they arrive like beautifully coloured stones that need several days to ripen before eating. This is not the way to eat a peach.

Nevertheless, like many Quebecers, I will buy them as they are, a poor shadow of what they could and should be but still the Queen of fruit.