Peachy keen (+recipes)

Paul Jobin. Photo / Supplied

When I was 8 years old my grandmother would send me out with a wicker basket to harvest fresh ingredients from her garden for dinner.

If I wasn't back after an hour, she'd send Grandad out to search for me. Inevitably I'd be found either sitting in the dirt in the vege patch eating podded peas or high in the plum tree, my presence given away only by the piles of plum stones on the ground underneath me.

I was reminded of these adventures, and just how stone fruit epitomise the Kiwi summer, on a recent trip through the Kawarau Gorge, headed to Cromwell in Central Otago. We stopped at a roadside stand laden with an abundant crop of meaty cherries, plums and apricots. Large amounts of the Dawson cherries quickly became our road-trip snack.

There is no record of who introduced stone fruit to New Zealand. Groves of wild peaches were found growing along several North Island rivers by the first European settlers and the first peach orchard was planted about 1840.

Among the first fruit trees officially imported to New Zealand were Golden Queen and Paragon peaches, and Goldmine nectarines. Popular early varieties of apricot were the Roxburgh Red (imported from Australia in 1867), Moorpark (from England) and Newcastle (from California).

The Greengage plum was the most popular for making jam, the Omega variety is the most widely planted in New Zealand, with the Black Doris second.

When the plums were at their most plentiful, I set up a drying rack made of chicken wire and left halved plums to dry into prunes in the heat of the sun. I then macerated them to make plum vodka.

Fresh plums also work exceptionally well dotted in a frangipane tart. Finish it off by drizzling the baked surface with warm, dense vanilla syrup. But for me, peaches are the star of the summer show. Eaten with a sharp vegetable knife and napkin, with juice dribbling down your chin, they're very sexy.

Peaches are mentioned in Chinese writings as far back as the 10th century BC, but became particularly famous about 1892 when Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at Covent Garden. At a dinner to celebrate the performance, chef Auguste Escoffier created a new dessert featuring peaches resting on a bed of vanilla icecream topped with spun sugar - it was all presented in an ice sculpture of a swan. In 1900, Escoffier updated the dessert by topping the peaches with raspberry purée.