Читать книгу The Orchard - Catherine Temma Davidson - Страница 5

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Prologue

Apricot Jam

What is an apricot? An apricot is a small fruit, from a small tree. Apricots fit into your hand. They fit into your pocket.

Everyone knows about peaches. Peaches get good publicity. They appear on posters and in poems. Apricots are the poor relation of the peach, the cousin with only a suitcase. But when you eat an apricot, you understand its power.

The flavor is deeper, stronger. It comes alive on your tongue and bites. You can cook with apricots. You can dry them. Dried apricots keep their flavor like no other fruit. Apricots can be addictive.

Inside the apricot is a stone. Inside the stone is a soft heart. Inside the soft heart? Some say poison. Some say health. Eat too much and it can kill you. Eat just enough and it can cure you.

Where do apricots come from? China? India? People have been eating apricots for a long time. You can find traces of apricots in ruins three thousand years old.

The scientific name for the apricot is Prunus armeniaca, the Armenian plum. Today in Palestine if you say, “during apricot-blossom time,” you mean “never.” In Turkish, to say a thing is like “an apricot from Damascus” means there is nothing better.

There are many ways to make apricot jam. If you want a clear, sweet jam, it is easy. Find some lovely fruit. Take out the hard stones. Cut the fruit up into pieces. Put it into a big pot. Bring it to a boil. Add sugar. In ten to fifteen minutes, the fruit is cooked. Pop it into jars and voilà!

There is another way to make the jam, which I learned from my brother-in-law from Beirut. He learned it from his Syrian mother. Put the cooked apricots in pans. Use the pans your mother gave you. If you have lost your mother, buy new pans. Leave the pans in the sun. Cover them with cloth. The heat will pull up the water. Soon the fruit will turn the color of copper, of smoke. The taste deepens as the color darkens.

After a week, this jam will be ready for your jars.

When you eat this sun-ripened jam, part of you sings and part of you cries. You want to put spoonful after spoonful into your mouth until your belly hurts.

All the apricots in the world are linked to the first apricot. That piece of fruit came from a wild forest. One day, a human walking through the woods looked up. There in the branches was a glint of gold. Luckily for us, our ancestors knew how to climb. They knew how to reach. They knew how to grab for sweetness wherever they could.

The Orchard

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