Perfection. No, really. Perfect

My wife prefers nectarines to peaches. As in, nectarines are amazing; peaches are, well… OK…

I didn’t realize I had a position on such things, but then I was reminded of an afternoon in Paris many, many years ago – probably 1991. I was sitting in a plaza and I bought a couple of peaches from a greengrocer.

They. Were. Perfect. Perfectly ripe, juicy, peachy (duh) and absolutely sublime. As a consequence, I have always been more of a ‘peach’ guy. My wife tolerates this transgression the same way she tolerates most of my foibles – with undiminished grace and dignity.

I hadn’t thought about that anecdote until a whole case of nectarines showed up at our house a few days ago.

Every year, yours truly along with several families in the neighbourhood, buy tomatoes from a farm in Oliver, BC. It’s an organic farm and the roma tomatoes they grow are pretty amazing. Every year we take about 150lbs of tomatoes and turn them into a few dozen jars of sauce for use throughout the year. Now that I’m on a pizza kick, I’m using a lot more of said tomatoes, but it looks like we’ll only have a few jars left from last year before the next lot gets added to the cellar.

In addition to our tomato order, we also get a few pounds of garlic and a box of nectarines. Apparently the nectarines were so ripe that the farmer drove down that part of the order last week. Tomatoes show up tomorrow.

And the nectarines are perfect. Perfect as in perfect. I think I ate 4 of them yesterday. I eat fruit like this with no guilt at all. It’s fresh, organic, incredibly sweet, chock full of who knows how much nutritional goodness…

It doesn’t get any better than this. I’m speaking here in a specific way – there is no way that a nectarine, grown by anyone, anywhere, could be superior to the fruit that was sitting in front of me up until about 10 seconds ago. More about the objective value of the fruit itself, rather than the experience of eating it.

This is one of the cool things about ingredients – they have their flavour and they have their ‘best before’ but the taste is pretty linear. There isn’t any way to prepare or to create a better result. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, everything aligns and you can eat these things when they are absolutely at the peak of their goodness. No amount of creativity can change that.

Ok, fine. I’ll allow that it might well taste better being eaten in the plaza next to the Centre Georges Pompidou. It’s a nectarine from BC, not a miracle.