The first summer Tara and I were dating she went to Australia to work for a couple of weeks. It was the middle of winter there, of course, and she came back with a terrible cold and a wicked case of jet lag. When she arrived at my apartment from the airport I gave her some peach sorbet I’d made the night before. She put the first bite in her mouth and got tears in her eyes. “Oh my god,” she said, “you really do love me, don’t you?”
Peaches can do that to a person. To my mind they’re one of the best things about summer, up there with fresh tomatoes, sweet corn, raspberries, ridiculous amounts of basil, and…well, you get the idea. They’re churlish travelers, bruising and denting before they’re even ripe, so they’re really only worth getting in high summer from a farmers’ market or farm stand or, best of all, by picking your own. I won’t buy a peach without smelling it at the stem end. If I don’t get a rich, heady waft of summer, I keep looking.
There’s something intensely satisfying about eating a perfectly ripe peach out of hand, preferably outside or standing over a sink, but they’re even better with a hint of something sharp or bitter. The peach sorbet I made Tara (from a recipe in Lindsey Shere’s Chez Panisse Desserts) calls for cracking open a few peach pits and adding the almond-like kernel inside to sugar and peeled, sliced peaches before heating the whole mass gently, whirring it in a blender, and freezing it in an ice cream maker. The kernels lend a hint of nutty bitterness that takes the sorbet from luscious to transcendent.
The contrast need not be obvious to work well. Peach shortcake is a beautiful thing but it gets even better with slivers of lemon verbena folded into the whipped cream and peaches, since the lemony brightness of the herbs neatly balances the sweetness and richness. And peaches marry so well with blueberries, I think, because the latter are a little tart even when they’re perfectly ripe. I’ve been buying blueberries from Phillips Farm like a crack addict and making dish after dish with peaches and blueberries: heaping bowls full with tart yogurt every morning, pie and cobblers for dessert in the evenings. It doesn’t get any better than this.