Peaches and almonds are a perfect pair because they are the same. Oh but they are. No honestly, they are.
Examine if you will, gentlemen, a peach. Examine now an almond still in its fruit. Now if you’ll come with me to the next table, behold here a peach stone. And here an unshelled almond. And now, over at the cracking station, a peach kernel – and an almond. What do we see? Yes indeed - they are as like as thou are to thyself (with apologies to Messrs Horatio and Shakespeare who scholars agree were probably not talking about stone fruits at this juncture in the play …)
The almond is poisonous. It contains glycoside amygdalin, which turns into hydrogen cyanide. Yuk. One day, proto-almond produces a freak offspring. It’s probably shunned by its fellows and grows up deeply unhappy. Let’s not get into that. This freak of nature is unpoisonous. It’s ok to eat, if you crack it open and winkle out the dry inside. It’s very nutritious. This fact is, most likely, noticed by a human – and not a caveman, we’re only talking 3,000 years ago or so. This tree is now treasured (oh! It’s a swan, not an ugly duckling. How charming and improving) and has many little treelets of its own. Thus the almond.
Next door grew a proto-peach, close cousin of the proto-almond. It never had to struggle with overcoming poison prejudice like its amandoid cousin, because nobody was interested in eating the stone, but instead it was favoured for the succulence of its flesh and bred to be juicy and plump. You can, nevertheless, eat apricot kernels - but not too many because they're still a bit fatal.
You will have realised by now that peaches are not the only members of the extended family. Also apricots, apples, pears, plums and cherries. And wouldn’t you know – they all go splendidly with almonds. Really fantastic combinations. But the peach is the closest match, and perhaps the best. In every peach that is ever grown there is the memory of an almond. A whisper of the taste of that common ancestor. Every almond in every pie knows deep inside that if things had been a little bit different, it could have been a peach. In the one, you taste the other.
So how can we use this story of growth, rejection, exploitation and the passage of the years for our own benefit? Use stone fruits and almonds together. Put an almond biscuit with your peach melba. Crumble amaretti, or slosh amaretto over your baked apricots. Make the base of your next plum tart with ground almonds. Add marzipan to a cherry cake.
A note of caution, however. Stone fruits are lusciously soft, especially when cooked – make sure your almonds don’t introduce an unwelcome texture into the dish. Best to grind or use in pre-prepared paste, biscuit or booze form. Delicious.
Flickr photo credits: Open almond fruit – inarges; almond shell - avlxyz; peach – rageforst; almond pastry and stone fruit tart - QuintanaRoo
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