Westcoast Cooking

This month, we're celebrating stone fruits: cherries, peaches and plums. And this week, peaches are upon us.

Nothing says summer more sweetly than peaches do, and Washington State peaches, ripened in the long hours of summer sunlight and cooled in the dry evening air east of the mountains, are among the best in the world.

Once, my wife and I traveled east of the mountains with our friend Virginia Helmich who married into a fruit growing-family in the early years of the twentieth century.

"Oh the roads we traveled are all under the sagebrush now." Helmich might have been eighty then, but she insisted on driving her own car. We were travelled in tandem from Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands to the site of her old homestead in Wapato, near Yakima. Pausing at a rest stop along Interstate 90, she gazed out across the shimmering desert heat and reminisced.

"The first time I came into the valley with Mr. Helmich, we were newlyweds and we camped beside the car. It was an old model T," she chuckled, "We made a fire of sagebrush sticks to cook our breakfast. The ground was hard but we were young and it was all a great adventure." She closed her eyes lightly and shook her head from side to side as if to bring her self back into the present. Cicadas chirped in the lull until the next big wave of eighteen-wheelers whirred past and drowned their song.

At the orchard, a vast expanse of thousands of acres, Helmich pointed out the few hundred acres that had once been her in-laws' homestead. "All the farms were smaller then," she said. At the warehouse, Helmich was welcomed like royalty, and because we were with her we were led to the choicest, ripest fruits imaginable. But we were not alone. Dozens of locals flocked around the bins marked "Too ripe to ship," and the fragrance of peaches wafted around us like the spirits of the pioneers who long ago planted the first trees.

All the way home, the fragrance washed over us and the next winter when we opened jars of canned peaches, peach chutney and peach jam, the warmth and the surreal beauty of that day with Virginia Helmich came wafting out of the jars.

This week's recipes are designed to celebrate Perfect Peaches from Washington

Perfect Peach Preserves
While fully soft, ripened fruit is best for eating out of hand, the complex starch known as pectin is gradually converted into simple sugars as the fruit ripens. So for preserves and jams, barely ripened fruit is best. The key is to get fruit that is already fully fragrant, but not yet completely soft. The preserves, if the are not fully set will still be wonderful spooned over ice cream or made into a Trifle.

Peach Pie
Long before apple pie became synonymous with wholesome American food, peach pies were synonymous with American home cooking. In colonial times, peach trees were actually more common than apple trees on American farms. The secret to great peach pie is choosing good ripe peaches to start with and then peeling them. Another step that makes peach pie extraordinary is a woven lattice top. Blackberry, blueberry, or apricot pie can also be made with the same crust. Use six cups of berries or pitted and sliced apricots with the same amount of sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch called for in the filling.

Peach Ice Cream
Peach ice cream is the essence of summer. In its sheer uncalled-for goodness, it transcends the category of mere food and borders a realm of luxury attainable only by grace and good fortune. With a generous amount of pureed fresh peach, this version is almost like a hybrid of ice cream and sorbet. Be sure to use fragrant, fully ripened peaches. Prepare the custard several hours before you plan to freeze the ice cream.