The first peach of the year

People ask, almost weekly, when the peach is coming back. The honest answer is: when the Stratford trees decide.

Stratford is two hours south of us, in the lower part of Oklahoma’s stone-fruit belt. The growers we work with put their first peaches on the table sometime between mid-May and the end of June, depending on what March did to them. A late frost can shorten the season by three weeks. A wet spring can mean the early fruit is fine but the late fruit splits on the vine. We don’t always know until the call comes.

When the call comes, we drive down. We taste before we buy — not because we don’t trust the orchard, but because the conserve is what carries the dessert and the conserve only works if the fruit was right. A peach that’s been picked one day too early tastes thin. One day too late and the flesh turns pulpy when you cook it. We’re looking for the day in the middle, and that’s a window of about thirty-six hours.

Back at the kitchen, we slice and macerate. The conserve goes in shallow trays so the sugar pulls evenly; we cook it down low, with a few sprigs of lemon thyme from the pots by the back door. The whole batch becomes our peach inventory for that week — usually six or seven dozen entremets’ worth of conserve, frozen in flat sheets so we can portion exactly what each piece needs.

The Pêche itself comes out of the case the morning of. Vanilla mousseline around a square of conserve, on a brown-butter sablé, sprayed with cocoa-butter velvet to mimic the down on a real peach. The first one of the season is always slightly off — the spray’s been sitting through winter, the curd needs adjusting — and by the second week we’re hitting it.

By August it’s the most-ordered piece in the case. By September we’re rationing what’s left in the freezer, stretching the conserve through Halloween. By the time the trees go bare we’ve moved on to apples, and the peach disappears until the next year. That’s the deal we make with the season. It’s also the reason it’s worth the wait.