Alexander - A Savor the South Cookbook: Peaches

a SAVOR THE SOUTH cookbook
Peaches

SAVOR THE SOUTH cookbooks

Peaches, by Kelly Alexander (2013)

Tomatoes, by Miriam Rubin (2013)

Pecans, by Kathleen Purvis (2012)

Buttermilk, by Debbie Moose (2012)

2013 Kelly Alexander
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.
SAVOR THE SOUTH is a trademark of the University of
North Carolina Press, Inc.
Designed by Kimberly Bryant and set in Miller and
Calluna Sans types by Rebecca Evans.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alexander, Kelly.
Peaches / Kelly Alexander.
pages cm. (A savor the South cookbook)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4696-0197-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cooking (Peaches) I. Title.
TX813.P4A44 2012
641.6425dc23 2012026668

17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

To my sister, friend,
and fellow native Georgian,
Laura Sheffield Bennett

Life is better than death, I believe,
if only because it is less boring and because it has
fresh peaches in it.ALICE WALKER

a SAVOR THE SOUTH cookbook
Peaches

MY FUZZY MEMORY

The single most memorable peach-flavored thing I ever ate was at a Fourth of July barbecue. I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I was with my friend Jamies family. Jamies parents were divorced, and her father had remarried. His new wifes relatives had a farm in North Georgia near the base of the Appalachian Trail, and it had a creek with a tire swing and a barn with chickens and roosters. Jamies stepmother used to hand us fresh limes with peppermint sticks stuck in them like straws and tell us to go for a walk. I loved going with Jamie there. To a girl whose Jewish grandparents settled in Atlanta by way of the BronxI knew more about chopped liver than I did about creamed cornthe rural setting was marvelously exotic.

The barbecue featured a whole hog with an apple in its mouth that was roasting on a spit over a homemade open fire pit. This was my first pig-pickin, and it was a textbook example of the genre. Jamies stepcousins were square dancing and creek-stomping, and there was a buffet table stocked with smoked meats, cornbread, potato salad, and just about every other iconic food of the American South you can conjure. Alongside the red-white-and-blue Jell-O mold and other tempting sweets, the dessert table contained small buckets of peaches, a gigantic deep-dish peach pie, and old-fashioned wooden churns, the dark and heavy barrel-like kind you pour rock salt into, filled with fresh peach ice cream.

It was this last dish that captured my attentionthe peach ice cream. By that point in my life, I had consumed peach ice cream countless times, most of it the Mayfield brand, made with milk from a dairy that was founded in 1910 in Athens, Tennessee. To this day, Mayfield is distributed exclusively in the southeastern United States; after entering the Atlanta market in 1977, it almost immediately became the best-selling brand and has remained so to this day. (In 1981, Time magazine named Mayfield the Worlds Best Ice Cream.) But back to the barbecue in question, which took place on a very, very hot day.

People from the South feel about the heat the way people from Chicago (and I should know because my husband is one of the latter) feel about the cold: proud. It may not make a lot of sense to let extreme weather become a source of regional pride, but when your weather is extreme, thats exactly what happens. You can always spot a real southerner on a hot day: Were the ones foolhardy enough to still be outside when the thermometer rises above 100.

And so it was on the afternoon of the barbecue in question. Steam was rising all around the wooden churns, little wisps of cold white air shrouding the ice cream so that it looked like a mirage, like buckets of manna. When I finally bellied up to the table and scooped some out into my little paper bowl, it looked different from the peach ice cream Id had before. I was used to ice cream that was peach-colored and smooth, a homogenized, factory-made product. What I was looking at, however, was goldenrod-yellow and studded with orange squares. When I sampled this strange concoction, I discovered that it wasnt so much peach-flavored as intensely cold custard loaded with fresh ripe peaches.

I stood in that large open field, in the days when a tick bite wasnt something that you worried could end your life, when I hadnt yet felt a proper kiss, when the Fourth of July seemed like it lasted for about a week squished into one perfect day... and that homemade peach ice cream was the most delicious thing Id ever tasted. There is not a summer or a peach or a Fourth of July when I dont think about it, when I cant close my eyes and teleport back to that farm, to the hot sun on my face and the cold, creamy peach ice cream on my tongue. And that was the beginning of my relationship with the peach.

The assumption about women from Georgia is not just that we enjoy our celebrated native stone fruit, its that we embody it. Georgia peaches means us girls born in the thirteenth of the original thirteen New World colonies, us girls whove rafted the Chattahoochee River, witnessed the Pink Floyd Laser Light Show projected onto Stone Mountain, drunk Coca-Cola out of the bottle with boiled peanuts on the side. Thats a Georgia peach for you.

I was born in Georgia and so was my mother, and being a girl from Georgia is a big part of who I am. Its why Im soft on the outside but tough on the inside, rather like that peach for which the state is so well known. The only problem was that for a long time I carried a secret inside my summer tan (which was never protected well enough by sunscreen from the Georgia sunanother trait of the Georgia woman, Im afraid, is sun addiction): For most of my early life, I didnt much care about peaches. It wasnt that I didnt appreciate their essencesweet, floral, fragrant, summer in a fruit and all the rest. It was that they were so ubiquitous. There was fresh peach ice cream at every Fourth of July barbecue; there were peaches at every roadside stand when we drove to Florida; my grandfather ate a bowl of peaches topped with sour cream every day for breakfast (when it wasnt peach season, he went with canned).

You see, I may love being from Georgia, but I didnt always love being in Georgia. Growing up, I longed for the big city, the bustle and traffic and different sorts of people and different types of music. And when I got to New York City, I immediately noticed that girls all ate cut-up fruit that they bought from the refrigerated shelves of corner bodegas. A fresh peach was so rural, so rustic; a plastic container of perfectly diced pineapple or mango was so much more worldly and sophisticated. The city peaches were in your muffin or your plastic container of yogurt or the chutney at the Indian restaurant, never in the palm of your hand.

And a funny thing happened to me, the kind of thing that happens when youre far away from home and kind of blue and you go to a party and the Allman Brothers song Melissa is playing and you remember that the Allman Brothers lived in Macon, Georgia, and that they had an album called Eat a Peach. (Crossroads, will you ever let him go? Lord, Lord. / Or will you hide the dead mans ghost? / Or will he lie beneath the clay? / Or will his spirit float away? / But I know that he wont stay / without Melissa.) And then you want a peach more than youve ever wanted anything. You want to push your lips against that fuzzy skin, let your jaws go to work feasting on the flesh as the juice pours down your throat, let your teeth scrape the red pit to get every last bite. If this sounds like purple prose to you, I am not sorry: No edible flesh is more similar to human flesh than the peachs, and no skin or peel is as smooth as the one the peach wears. A peachs erotic properties are something we all must contend with, so why not celebrate them?