I took a double-take as I scanned the produce at a Middle Eastern grocery store. Piled up among the Iranian cucumbers, Indian baby eggplants, and ricrac-wavy Romano green beans was a heaping box of tiny apricots. It was the second day of June and my third attempt to find an apricot that tasted like an apricot. Fool me twice; shame on me crossed my mind as I held the ripe fragrant fruit to my nose.
The tiny fruit felt as it should, with a slight give of the flesh and skin. I was tempted to pop the walnut-size fruit in my mouth, but visions of watery, mealy, inedible fruit and a pit clacking around in my teeth quashed the impulse.
Finding a naturally ripe apricot in a store is a rarity. Cousins to the peach and plum, apricots are delicate fruits sensitive to harsh winds and late frosts. Unlike the one-size-fits-all grocery store supply chain system, ripe apricots require a personal touch. They must be picked at just the right time, not too early, not too late, to achieve a perfect balance of tartness and sweetness. With this market’s connections to growers of fruits and vegetables seldom seen elsewhere, they didn’t worry about forecasting tools, blockchains, or transportation efficiency. To them, quality is based on taste.
This bin of tiny coral-colored apricots looked like the ones that grew wild on the edge of a field near our former home in Gaeta, Italy. We were part of an American US Navy community with a small detachment for the Sixth Fleet in the seaside village. Our yellow brick townhome sat at the end of a cobblestone road atop a hill overlooking a peninsula surrounded by the aqua-blue Terranean Sea. The apricot tree was but one of many discoveries that convinced me my sons would find their best lives in this ancient Roman town.
The Italian Apricot Tree
Compared to flinty gray and brittle-cold Toronto, where we had just come from, this seaside village was poured with golden sunshine and teemed with insects, reptiles, birds, flowers, trees, and sea life. We had been here a week; my seven-year-old son was impatient to explore. I kept putting him off because I was still recovering from losing our younger son on our move-in day.
When my three-year-old and a friend wandered off during a thunderstorm, we did as every American does—formed a posse and noisily yelled, knocking on strangers’ doors. While slipping along the rain-soaked cobbled road and looking in windows, I saw two smiling blonde boys sitting on an older woman’s lap through the pane.
The rain may have hidden my tears, but not my fear, as I stood on the home’s threshold, water pooling on the polished tiles from my dripping hair and clothes. It wasn’t a good look or a good first impression to meet the neighbors. I heard the nonna’s daughter say in Italian and English, “Stai tranquila, per favore (be calm, please); eh reggazzini, the little boys outside, rain and thunder, boom, not safe. Capisci? I nodded weakly, thinking I had much to learn about Italian mothers. “Que bella,” the nonna said as the boys hugged her, and she pinched their cheeks (yes, it really happens). The boys gleefully parroted “ciao, ciao,” as my shaky arms hugged their damp hair. I had a lot to learn about this place.
A few days later, standing on my bedroom terrace with an arm around my older son’s shoulder, I could feel the anticipation radiating from his slender frame as we negotiated how far his exploratory boundaries would go. I leaned over the rail, eyeing the alleyway two stories below. His head of golden curls sagged, and his heavily lashed, brown eyes filled with disappointment, saying, “Not far enough.”
Taking a deep breath to calm my worry and silently repeating my new Italian word of the week tranquile, I drew an imaginary line in the sky around the field behind us, stopping at a tree. The grassy lot was penned in by a sandy-colored stone wall and draped with paper-thin fuschia bougainvilleas. What trouble could happen here? It was too late to reconsider my generous ruling as I heard his leather sandals slapping on the marble stairs and the door slamming shut.
I secretly watched through the windows as he focused on an apple-green lizard clinging to the warm brick on the side of the house and snuck up on plump, furry bumblebees drunk with pollen nestling in the purple Morning Glories entwined in the iron fence. I could already imagine the difficult time his teachers would have to keep his attention on schoolwork with all the blooming, buzzing, flying, and crawling distractions outside.
The word stop caught in my throat when he ran down the hill to the tree at the edge of the field. He picked up something on the ground, ate it without hesitation, and smiled. Sun ripened apricots. Like the stray cat, Suzie, who came with the house, he claimed the tree as his own. With sticky hands and syrupy smiles, he and his younger brother quickly discovered that cooling breezes and the best-tasting snack could be found sitting in the branches of their apricot tree.
Apricots, a cross-cultural phenom
Thirty years later, I wanted my grandkids to have the same taste memory. Could the apricots in this market taste at least close to the fruit on our apricot tree? Taking a chance, a dozen cots went into the cart. As I untied the bag, the car filled with honey and floral aromas. Within nanoseconds of taking a bite, I knew I had found success—tart, with a breeze of sweetness and tender flesh that fell away easily from the pit.
Apricots, a member of the rose family, were cultivated as early as 2000 BC in Asia and Central Asia. The stone fruit is such an essential component of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that medical practitioners are called “experts of the apricot grove,” according to a Confucian allegory described in Robert N. Spengler’s III book Fruit from the Sands (University of California Press, 2019).
The yellow plum, or zardaloo, grew in popularity as Persian and Islamic tribespeople traveled on horseback on the Silk Road’s trading routes through Syria, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain. Ancient Romans called apricots praecocum, the “precocious one,” because they ripened first among all the stone fruits. Arab cultures overcame the apricot’s short season and fragility by drying the fruit. They invented amardine, translated as Moon of the Faith, a dried apricot paste for a refreshing drink to break a Ramadan fast.
As early as 750 AD, the fruit inspired cooks throughout the Mediterranean to concoct tangy, sweet confections and use apricots tartness to balance the rich, fattiness of lamb and chicken. Today, fresh ideas using apricots are evolving worldwide. For instance, in her book King Solomon’s Table (Alfred Knopf, 2017), Joan Nathan’s chicken with tamarind, apricots, and chipotle sauce illustrates how recipes using apricots have become borderless.
The book showcases how traditional Jewish recipes change as people move around the world. For example, the original recipe of apricots and roasted chicken dates back centuries to the Middle East. Flora Cohen, whose Jewish family moved to Mexico from Guatemala and, before that, lived in Syria, added sour tamarind, a typical Mexican ingredient. Cohen taught cooking to newlywed women in her community, and one of her students, Pati Jinish, one-upped the recipe with chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.
The well-traveled recipe is now sweet and tart with a punch of heat. You may know Jinish as a culinary television personality and her James Beard award-winning show La Frontera. Jinish writes on her blog, “People wonder about the existence of Jewish Mexican cuisine. This dish is but one example. After I was asked to teach a class on Jewish Mexican cooking, I realized it could have been an ongoing series. Just a small window into the fascinating twists and turns that foods take on as they travel through the world in unimaginable kinds of luggage and intermingle with their new homes.”
For another culinary travel treat, visit Patterson, California, which proudly calls itself the World’s Apricot Capital and celebrates the fruit every late May and early June with an Apricot Fiesta. There are hundreds of apricot varieties, each with unique flavor and characteristics. Your grocery store likely carries the Royal Blenheim, a popular variety. But keep an eye out for new varieties, always in development, with names that evoke their unique qualities and those who love them, like Gold Bar, Ruby Royal, Tom Cots, Bonny Cots, and Sandy Cots.
Residents of Patterson eagerly anticipate sales of the CandyCot apricot from Fat Apple Produce. The CandyCot was the invention of John Driver, whose family owned fruit orchards in Patterson. As an agricultural consultant, Driver traveled to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, where he discovered new apricot varieties. He brought back hundreds of apricot seeds and, for fifteen years, tinkered with a new variety with a concentrated sweet and jammy intense flavor. Unfortunately, the CandyCot wasn’t commercially viable in the long run, but growers continued to sell them locally.
If you are passionate about California apricots and can’t make it to the fiesta, check out the online shops at Traina Foods, Stewart & Jasper Orchards, or Melissa’s (I do not get a fee for the recommendation or any purchases).
Apricot takeaways
- As their Roman moniker implies, ripe apricots are typically ready to be harvested early, in May or June. Some are orange-yellow and light yellow (called white), and others have specks or swatches of darker coral color.
- If you come across naturally ripened apricots or a unique varietal, purchase them. Leave them on the counter to ripen fully and consume them quickly.
- Dried apricots come in two forms: with sulfur (sulphur) dioxide to retain the fruit’s vivid, peachy color and plumpness, and naturally dried, with a chewy, leathery texture and brown flesh. If you are known to have allergic reactions to preservatives like sulfur, read the labels carefully.
- Naturally ripe apricots are perfect when eaten out of hand, but consider using dried and fresh for salads, juices, smoothies, milkshakes, syrups, desserts, and savory dishes with chicken and lamb.
