It’s hard to know whether to stare at apricots, stroke them lovingly or sink your teeth into them. They look like diminutive babies’ bottoms – beautifully curved, perfect in form and just as soft of skin. That skin is never fluffy like that of a peach, but feels more like suede – and their flavour is more complex and infinitely superior. To appreciate that, though, you have to find a ripe one, which isn’t as easy as you might think.
The fruits are usually picked unripe so they can travel and keep longer, which means they don’t always develop as much perfume and flavour as they could. Taking a ripe apricot off a tree on a warm day is the thing to do. I once stayed in a house in Italy set among orchards. The days were scorching and the trees were heavy with fruit. Insects droned around the apricot trees more than any other, and the smell as you lay underneath them was so sweet it could have made you drunk. I used to eat these apricots for breakfast, with yogurt, parma ham, panettone and strong black coffee. It seemed the most luxurious meal in the world.
If you eat a ripe apricot you find honey, violets, vanilla, almonds and muscat in the fruit’s flesh
An apricot’s sweetness is perfectly balanced by its tartness. If you eat a properly ripe one you can find honey, violets, vanilla, almonds and muscat in that flesh, too. The viognier grape – grown in the Rhone and used to make the fabled white wine, condrieu – is often said to taste of apricots and violets. It’s not a bad sensory exercise to savour a glass of this to enhance your appreciation of the fruit.
As the turn-of-the-century French physician, Henri Leclerc, opined in his book Les Fruits de France, the apricot seems to embody both a sense of the East and its ‘otherness’, and the homely sensations of the French countryside. When I’m cooking them, or just putting them in a bowl, I know what he means. On the one hand they are cute fruits that can bring back memories of holidays in France and Italy. On the other, they can seem mysteriously exotic, even impenetrable. Read a bit more about them and this notion is consolidated. Their wild ancestor is thought to have had its home in China (where apricots were much prized, and were salted and smoked, as well as dried) and there are accounts of the fruit reaching the West via silk traders, which is quite the most romantic way anything can arrive anywhere.
Their diversity, too, is much greater than you might expect; the varieties range in colour from white and black, to pink and yellow, some as small as a pea, others as large as a peach. I would like to get my hands on a white one from the Near East. It is pale, blushed with pink, with a delicate flavour comparable to that of a white peach, but, I bet, much more fragrant and elusive.
The range of dishes in which apricots are used illustrates both sides of their personality. There are homely crumbles (the best of which also contain the fruit’s most perfect bedfellow, the almond), glossy French tarts, compotes whose syrup has been perfumed with lavender or orange, dishes of dark sticky fruits baked in marsala, and cheering apricot cakes. But there are also apricot compotes scented with saffron or cardamom; the Turkish dish kaymakli kayisi, in which soaked dried apricots are stuffed with a kind of clotted cream, bathed in orange blossom syrup and scattered with pistachios; and sweet-sour Moroccan tagines and Persian khoreshts, in which they are teamed with lamb, honey and nuts. In between these, we find East and West coming together in the puddings of Central and Eastern Europe: the elegant meringue cake, apricot dacquoise, hot apricot dumplings, even a Hungarian apricot and walnut trifle.
The apricots we get in Britain aren’t necessarily the best for eating raw. But heat does wonders for them, bringing out their lovely honeyedness. Turn them into fools and tarts, poach them, bake them, make stews with them, or just pile them into a bowl and admire them. Much has been written about fruits that ‘glow’ – lemons, oranges, apples – but it’s only really true of the apricot.