I’ve never really liked fruit. I’m picky and the stuff my mother used to try to make me eat was always under-ripe and sour or bitter. But we’ve been hitting the farmer’s market recently and the stuff there is lovely and ripe and sweet. It’s been mostly cherries and cantaloupe and I’ve even been buying some at the grocery store. This weekend, I saw a recipe for peaches with pecorino and prosciutto. It looked tasty so I picked up some peaches when I was out to buy batteries.
I decided to try it last night. It was the first time I’ve ever prepared a peach that didn’t come put of a can. I sliced the peach in half around the stone and pulled the stone out. Have you ever really looked at the inside of a peach?
The outside is weird enough. Ordinarily, you toss fuzzy fruit in the garbage or in a bottle to ferment. Plus, peaches look like butts.
I’ve encountered cherry stones and olive pits. They’re vaguely almond shaped, the surface is lightly textured, and bits of the fruit often cling to them. The peach stone is this big brown thing that you can pop out of the surrounding fruit. Convenient and practical and then you take a good look at it. It’s not lightly textured like other fruit pits, it’s all high ridges and deep crevices. Deep, dark crevices, un-illuminated by the kitchen light. It seems vaguely Lovecraftian and one wonders if it conceals not the peach seed, but something eldritch and forbidden.
The inside of the peach is bright pink around the stone, like skin around a wound. And in case you missed that subtle creepiness, when you remove the pit you’ll see that peaches grow tentacles. Little tentacles that reach in to fill the crevices of the stone and are rudely exposed when it’s removed. When I saw these, the part of my brain that reads too much sci-fi tensed and waited for the tentacles to move and grow and reach for me. When they didn’t, I tempted them by prodding them with my fingernail. When they still didn’t move, I scraped them out with a spoon then cooked and ate my peach as the recipe directed.
As it turns out, my peaches were slightly under-ripe so I’ll try the recipe again in a day or two. And this time I’ll be prepared for the tentacles.
“As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn’t a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!”
Many fresh fruits creep me out. Now, if someone has prepared that fruit in a dish that I can consume, I’m usually pretty good with it. But other than that, it’s all fuzz and pits and seeds and questions and very few answers. Fruit is a science unto itself.
I’ve never liked peaches. My mom used to give us canned peaches and canned fruit cocktail when we were kids, and I always hated it.
I never liked fresh peaches, either. They just taste funny.
I love bananas and cantelopes. And raspberries and blueberries.
I love sliced bananas on cereal.
I love peaches but I can only buy them at farmer’s markets during the summer to get fully ripe, fragrant peaches all the way around. The rest of the year, no matter how expensive they are, the peaches are rock hard on one side and mushy on the other side. I guess this just makes the peaches well worth waiting for.
With Freestone peaches you can just pop the seed out pretty cleanly. Clingstone peaches have to be cut away though. The supermarket near where I work has some nice freestone peaches, but most of them are hard so you have to wait a day or two for them to ripen enough to be soft and juicy. Their nectarines on the other hand are almost always cannonballs. Which is a shame, as this is a pretty classy (and absolutely ginormous) supermarket.
Occasionally this supermarket also carries “Donut peaches.” I believe they’re genetically altered peaches with really tiny stones in them, which gives them a distinctly squashed look. Those look like butts.
Nothing beats the taste of a peach. Now I am not talking about what they sell at grocery stores that “pretend” to be peaches. A real peach needs to be bigger than your fist, * at least * and they must be just soft enough for the skin to be peeled off nicely, but not too soft.
And whenever possible they are to be freshly picked.
You want really creepy? Try split-kernel peaches. These turn up at farmers’ markets (never supermarkets) when the fruit has ripened extra-fast, usually because of heavy rains followed by a heat wave. The excessive moisture (I think) causes the pit to split apart, with the cleft often running all the way up to the stem.
I’ve had problems with split-kernel peaches ever since a couple summers ago when I was cutting one apart and a VERY large, very glossy, very VERY lively earwig crawled out of its hiding place in the split kernel and started running around my sink.
Even uninhabited split-kernels have to be eaten quickly; the split is a haven for mildew and a great place for rot to start.
If a peach pit does split apart, you’ll notice the actual kernel resembles an almond. Unlike actual almonds, it contains cyanide.
Other than that, I love peaches. Ripe ones, that is; I won’t have anything to do with the tennis-ball variety. There’s some sliced peaches from the farmers’ market in my fridge right now. Yum.
And you may think peaches look like butts, but the combination of fuzz, soft flesh, a groove, and profuse sweet juice has reminded enough people of a vulva to earn peaches a traditional reputation as an aphrodisiac. YMMV.
Ewww, the OP reminds me: I was doing some cleaning in my kitchen, on an oft-neglected corner of the counter. I moved my daughter’s lunch box (more or less untouched since the end of the school year), and there, under her lunchbox, was a bag with three peaches in it. Or at least they used to be peaches. At some point in time. Yuck.
I used to eat canned peaches, and then my father convinced my to try a fresh one.
Yuck. The skin on it felt like human skin, and it was all weird colors inside (as opposed to the slimy, yellowy peach parts from the can). Now I don’t even like canned peaches anymore.
Of course, a long-ago incident with a bottle of peach schnapps may have something to do with my aversion. The very smell of peaches makes me slightly queasy.
Better than a mango, they’re all reptilian. The mango pit is a deep, cold blooded, lizard heart. Tough amphibious peels. Better than Monkey Balls (kiwi) with tart, fresh, and green flesh.
YMMV.