Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?

It's the time of summer when I start thinking of my grandmother's cooking, especially her peach cobbler.  I can make peach cobbler on my own, of course--the way I like it, with more pastry and a better quality ice cream.  But I'm not crazy about getting the peaches off the stone.

Still, yesterday I was in the Fresh Market, and I thought, let me get some peaches.  I saw the boxes that the peaches were in--they were from a farm in South Carolina, which I thought was a good sign.

In the brief moment before I picked up a peach, I thought about those South Carolina peach farms, the gnarled trees so bare in the winter, full of blooms in the spring, heavy with fruit in the summer.  I thought of road side stands, where I first learned the difference between a peck and a bushel.

And then I picked up the peach to bring it to my nose.  Oh dear.  What a hard rock of a peach.  Sadness.

So, there will be no peach cobbler at my house this week-end.  I am baking a cinnamon pecan coffee cake to welcome the new librarian tomorrow.  That smell which is filling the house carries a different set of memories--Saturday mornings, especially with guests who arrived for the week-end.  My mother's recipe calls for a pound of butter and 2 cups of sour cream.  I'm making a version with just 2 sticks of butter and 1 cup of sour cream--same 9 x 13 inch pan, but none of us needs all that fat.

It is not the same towering denseness, but it is delicious nonetheless.