I was going to write about apricots and their strange duality — how they can disappoint you raw, and then astonish you cooked, turning jammy, sharp and almondy through the heat. I wanted to make a big apricot mess, with ricotta cream and a sweet crumble over the top. I had all my thoughts in order. I was ready.
But when I went to find the apricots, the apricots weren’t there. Not good ones, anyway. They were pale and hard and smelled of nothing, which is a nonstarter for any stone fruit. And so the apricot essay must wait for another summer. Here we are, instead, with nectarines.
There’s a film — “Sliding Doors,” you probably know it — in which Gwyneth Paltrow misses a Tube train, and her whole life splits in two. In one version, she catches it: She gets the job, meets the man, builds the life she thought she wanted. In the other, the doors close in her face, and everything goes differently. The entire film is built on those closed doors and the idea that the version where things don’t go to plan might just be the better one.
So when my apricots weren’t there, I found myself turning to nectarines — arriving right on time, as they always do, plentiful and ripe.
Nectarines have always been an understudy: to my missing apricots, and to their prominent sibling, the peach. The flesh is firmer, and the sweetness more concentrated. There is a much-sung joy in a peach eaten outside in the sun, juice running down your arm, and I won’t argue with that. But I’ve had exactly the same joy from a nectarine.
Yet history, culture, time — none of them landed on the nectarine’s side. Georgia is the Peach State. It was a peach that T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock couldn’t bring himself to eat (“Do I dare to eat a peach?”), a single fruit carrying the full weight of human hesitation and mortality. There are peach festivals and peach songs and a mythology stretching back centuries to ancient China, where peaches grow in the Jade Emperor’s garden and grant immortality to whoever eats them. Sun Wukong steals them in “Journey to the West” and causes chaos across the heavens. Roald Dahl, inspired by a cherry tree in his garden, considered several different giant fruits before settling on a peach for James.
But the nectarine has no poets, no state, no mythology. The word arrived in English in 1616 — it means simply “nectarlike,” which is either a lovely name or a slightly desperate one, depending on your generosity. The fruit has been standing quietly in the peach’s fuzzy shadow ever since.
A ricotta cream helps round out the nectarines’ juiciness.Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
I find I enjoy nectarines more often. The window for a perfect peach (as for the apricot) is narrow: Catch it a day late, and it’s either woolly or collapsing. But a nectarine at less than peak ripeness is still worth eating. Roasted — halved, cut side down, with a little butter and honey — the flesh caramelizes and concentrates beautifully. It works in a sweet summer salad, scattered over burrata with torn basil and a good drizzle of oil. In a pie, its slight tartness holds up against buttery pastry.
… Or perhaps I just like an underdog.
This is peak nectarine season. I have been eating them for breakfast, for snacks, for a quick dessert after dinner. Sliced over yogurt, while standing at the kitchen counter with juices covering my hands and chin.
I’m in no rush to find apricots now. Nature had other plans for me this month — closed one door, opened another — and it turns out, as it so often does, that nature was right.
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