They can be sweet, sharp, even sensual: our award-winning food writer Diana Henry savours the transient pleasures of stone fruits

The hardest food to let go of as we ease into autumn isn’t summer tomatoes – soon I’ll start roasting big plum ones, which I like just as well – or sherbetty strawberries, it’s stone fruit. Peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums – they won’t be as good, and mostly won’t be available, until about June.

Enjoying food can mean giving yourself up to it. Langoustines that you attack with your hands, asparagus whose tips you drag through hollandaise – these are sensual pleasures requiring your full attention. With stone fruits I turn it up a notch. The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches.’ I know what he meant. I used to handle peaches carefully when we ate them on beach picnics, scared of them falling in the sand. You could hold your peach up to the sky, so it became the sun, the warm weight of summer in your hand. Peaches are more than just symbols of a season, though. Any fruit with a stone contains something hidden, something precious.

I was read the Japanese folk tale of Momotarō, which means ‘peach boy’, at primary school. In the story an old couple who haven’t been able to have a child of their own find a giant peach with a boy inside it. Born of the peach,

Momotarō is special – good and brave – fighting evil as he grows up. He is a role model for Japanese children. In Japan, a peach isn’t just a peach.

Peaches are culturally significant in China, too. Despite its botanical name, which translates as ‘Persian plum’, China is the peach’s home. It’s associated with the elimination of evil, brides carry peach blossom and in some regions a haven is referred to as ‘peach-blossom land’. And it’s impossible to ignore more recent symbolic uses, as in TS Eliot’s

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock ,aman who isn’t sure whether he should ‘dare’ to eat a peach. Some have suggested his ageing has made him frightened of even the simplest acts, others that he is too anxious to engage in lusciousness, either by eating peaches or having sex.

Peaches also make me think of a gentle kind of love – it’s the soft skin and the dimples. In Peaches – Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo, American Sandra Cisneros writes, ‘If peaches had arms/ surely they would hold one another/in their peach sleep.’

I recently read nectarines described as ‘bald peaches’, which seems a bit cruel. For cooking I prefer them; they’re shot through with tartness. Peaches might be delicious in the cake overleaf but don’t work well in tarts or crumbles – there’s no contrast. Nectarines are a different matter. Apricots I will cook until the last one disappears at the end of September. It’s getting harder to find them and I’m already looking forward to their return, though there aren’t many ardent apricot lovers on these shores. Apricots have to be largely imported from Spain or Italy and are often woolly and tasteless, but heat does wonders for them, driving off moisture and intensifying both their tart and honeyed notes. Pastry adores them.

Plums, meanwhile, those purple bruises, are for eating out of your hand, the fruit you pick up when you’re in perky Doris Day mode. They’re less showy than other stone fruit, less demanding of attention, more everyday, and there’s comfort in that. Now is the time to bake them and eat them, slightly warm, with a stream of cold cream, or use them in the pudding below.

I’ve started to eat both peaches and nectarines with a knife, cutting off slices but never biting into the whole fruit. This means you get more juice in your mouth and less down your T-shirt. I use a small Japanese knife my sister gave me for the job. I wonder if it is about taking more time to savour every mouthful. I hope I am going to remain more Wallace Stevens and less J Alfred Prufrock.