Photo by Judd Pilosoff; food stylist: Liz Duffy; prop stylist: Laura Hart
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Juicy Fruit
By David Mas Masumoto, July & August 2008
A summer spent bonding with my grandmother over peaches
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Try This Recipe...
Peach Quencher
I grew up on a small family farm south of Fresno, California. My grandmother, an immigrant who arrived here from Japan, never learned English. As a child, I knew only a few words of Japanese.
When I tell people that now, they say, “How sad that you never had a conversation.”
But we did speak—through the language of food. My grandmother and I bonded during peach harvests.
How to Pick a Peach
Ripe fruit has a golden undertone and is slightly soft to the touch. Trust your nose: if the peach smells good, it usually is.
Every summer our family packed peaches in our barn. One job was to sort through the fruit and separate the ones with bruises or other flaws from the rest to be shipped. My grandmother and I also saved a few of the very soft, very ripe, very gushy ones and set them aside.
At the end of a long workday, I’d sit next to my four-foot-eight-inch grandmother, who, though decades older, was not much bigger than I. She was alone now, her husband having passed away years earlier.
Her life had not always been easy—she was an immigrant in a foreign land, working in the fields her entire life. I’ve since wondered if, for a moment, she found an escape in the simple act of eating a peach.
Our ritual began by selecting the softest peach we could find. Just before her first bite, she would pause, then sink her teeth into the supple flesh. The nectar exploded in her mouth, and the juice burst over her face, ran down her cheeks, and dangled on her chin. I could see her grinning under the oozing liquid.
And, oh, the sounds she made! By that time, my grandmother’s teeth had become weak, so instead of taking big bites, she would gnaw the meat from the soft fruit, all the while making these wonderful smacking and sucking sounds.
I’d try to mimic her, biting into a peach and slurping the soft flesh while the juice squirted out and dribbled down my chin.
Two generations eating peaches. No words. Just an indelible moment spent savoring a harvest all our own.
David Mas Masumoto is an organic farmer and the author of Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer (Great Valley Books, 2007).
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