Looking for the Last Great Apricot
Such is the crux of the apricot dilemma: Store-bought apricots are ripened in the packing crate, so most shoppers end up with hard, mealy, tasteless apricots—like the patterson and the castlebrite. This latter variety is a favorite of farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. It matures early, in May, when consumers are willing to pay premium prices for pretty apricots. The castlebrite, however, is bland, sometimes sour, and in one bite it can discourage customers for an entire season—or a lifetime. No wonder annual per capita fresh apricot consumption in America is a pathetic 3.5 ounces, and overall production half of what it was at its peak.
The American apricot's best hope may reside in its heritage. It is a stone fruit, part of the peach, plum, cherry, and almond family, and indirectly related to the rose. Originating not in Armenia, which was once a common theory (hence its botanical name, Prunus armeniaca), but in the mountains of northern China as early as 2200 b.c., apricots spread along the silk route through Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Ancient Persians called them "eggs of the sun"; first-century a.d. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of praecoces; and Shakespeare used the fruit as a means of seduction: His Queen of Fairies plied her beloved with "apricocks" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Today, what may be called the great apricot belt runs from Turkey to China. Here, apricots grow in all their glorious diversity: one can find white, black, gray, and pink apricots, from pea- to peach-size. Some 2,000 varieties grow in China alone. California clearly has a long way to go. But fruit breeders, tinkering with stone fruits at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's California research stations, have created both better-tasting practical varieties and specialty hybrids. At the 20-acre Fresno station, I pick a rare white apricot—its pale skin, pink blush, and translucent flesh similar to that of a white peach—and a Pakistani hunza, a tiny, juicy apricot with tan-orange skin and flesh, a mysterious musky flavor, and enough sugar to rate a 32 on the Brix scale (the fruit farmer's standard scale for measuring sweetness). The typical castlebrite scores 10; the blenheim, 18.
Many experimental apricots, however, are too small, too soft, or too low-yielding to have any impact on the industry. Others are adapted to specific (i.e., impractical) growing conditions. For instance, try as I might, I could not find another hunza anywhere; spring rains had ravaged the crop.
Spring rains have long been the bane of the apricot grower; "cultivar rustlers" are a new worry. Floyd Zaiger, perhaps the leading developer of apricot hybrids, has a 125-acre lab and orchard in Modesto, and he has had to protect his plumcots (half plum, half apricot), trademarked apriums (more apricot than plum), pluots (more plum than apricot), and peacotums (an even mix of peach, apricot, and plum). More than once, agro-thieves with hopes of reproducing a prized new variety have been caught stealing cuttings in the dead of night.
The future may lie in these exotics—the velvety purple skin, crisp scarlet flesh, and apricot aroma of Zaiger's pluot is intriguing—but the traditional apricots are still my favorites: the last blenheims lingering on the gnarled trees of Mike McKinney's grove on the fringe of San Jose, for example, or the much-loved but commercially extinct English moorpark, legendary for its greengage-like flavor, that I sampled at Mariani Orchards (the Château Pétrus of apricot growers) in Morgan Hill. So, no, my memory had not deceived me all these years. Good fresh apricots do exist. I just had to go to California, to the orchard—to the tree—to get them. And I even have a tree of my own now: Our conflicting memories aside, Aunt Elly, honoring my passion for apricots, planted a blenheim tree four years ago. The first crop is expected next June.
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