Not Your Mother's Cookbooks

I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, which happened in a flash last week when I drove south on El Camino Real, passing the land that used to be Olson’s cherry orchards.  The aging cherry trees have been pulled out to make way for more shopping centers and apartments, which is also the fate for Brentwood, west of Stockton, where much of our California fruit has been coming from in the last decade.

Cherry Orchard in Winter by Arlette

The Olson cherry orchards were the last remnants of a day gone by when the Santa Clara Valley was spoken in the same breath as the heartland of France and Armenia, premier fruit growing regions of the Western world.  To newcomers to the Silicon Valley, it must be a stretch of the imagination to think this valley was a virtual Garden of Eden, fertile fields geometrically planted with all the common fruit trees–apricot, pear, cherry, and prune plums.  All are members of the rose family, so their blossoms upon close inspection look like tiny single-petaled roses.  The mass flowering of the these trees in early spring was a beautiful sight with the vivid green of the coastal range providing the background.

Apricot trees were first brought to California with the Franciscan friars and planted around the missions.  The first housing developments south of Palo Alto were carved into the center of the vast apricot orchards and I grew up under their boughs.  I used to sit in the the crook of the trees and eat my fill of tree-ripened golden-pink orbs in the first heat of summer, then pick a bag for my mom to make her double-crusted apricot pie and a Bisquick fruit-topped cobbler (the Bisquick website still has the recipe).

As a pre-teen, I would ride at 7 AM on the handlebars of my girlfriend’s bike to the Marinovitch orchard on Oak Avenue in Los Altos and cut cots alongside the Mexican workers in the steamy heat of early summer for $1.00 a tray, good money in those days for a kid.  Velvet-skinned Blenheim apricots have a distinctive perfume that is heady stuff on a hot day in a cutting shed.  Peak seasons record 200,000 tons of apricots picked in this area, much of it going to nearby canning factories and laid out on weathered shallow trays for sun-drying.

My boyfriend Steve’s parents had a large, sweet cherry tree on the corner of their property in Mountain View.  We would look up at that tree while it was ripening and lick our lips in anticipation.  The day would finally come when his dad would pronounce that they were ripe and arrange the old weathered fruit-picker’s ladder, which is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, against the trunk.  His dad would pick while we waited at the bottom of the ladder, and to his bemused irritation, eating all the cherries as fast as he would pick them.  There is an age-old art to plucking a dangling cherry off its short stem with your lips, manipulating the fruit off the pit in your mouth, then expelling the clean pit out with a short, swift blow.  Probably Black Tartarians, they were so dark purple they were bordering on black and almost painfully sweet.  It was a sad day when the tree was too old to bear anymore and had to be removed.  Picking and eating fresh cherries is such as joy that it is a sorry state of affairs to have to buy cherries at the supermarket.

Steve’s grandparents had this remarkable backyard. They picked the lot special since it was the biggest when they moved from San Francisco to Saratoga. It was a corner lot and and it was fence to fence fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and berry bushes. Grampy took me out one day to pick the blackberries. I was in a lot of pain with the piercing of my fingertips by the long thin thorns. There is a sort of mantra that goes with berry picking: “Oh, scratches are a PART of blackberry picking, that’s why they taste so good!” Grampy, whose fingertips were calloused from decades of home farming, would look up with a small smile on his face, and said to me, don’t worry, you will forget the pain soon when you eat them. Granny waited inside and then we poured fresh cream over the berries and let them chill until after our omelettes. Granny also made jam and jelly from these, currants, and raspberries, which were a loving treat. We used to go there every Sunday for brunch and I always left with bags full of whatever vegetable and fruit were in season plus some home canned item.

There were tons of peach trees when I moved to Santa Clara Valley with my family in 1962. Especially loved were the delicate white peaches that dotted the back yards. I had a friend who had a few trees and would invite me over to pick up a paper grocery bag full of them. Best eaten raw out of hand, I still made pies and crisps, but packed the excess peeled sliced peaches in clean half gallon milk cartons for storage in the freezer. White peaches are for canning, not for jam. My Nanny Hensperger always had jars of white peach halves down the cellar. She would take me down and hold back the floral cloth that covered the old shelf that was full of her canned goods. It was always a treat to look forward to when she allowed me to pick what jar to serve for dessert. As the years went by, there was a peach blight in the valley that in the next decade wiped out all the peach trees. If you loved peaches, you had to plant a new tree.

The history of the French prune plum coincides with the history of this valley.  French nurseryman Louis Pellier settled in the southern part of the valley in 1859, bringing with him the much loved D’Agen plum with his belongings from Bordeaux, a fruit which is still featured in so many tasty French recipes.

One early evening Steve and I headed down to see a movie at the newly opened big screen Century Movie Theatre on Winchester Boulevard.  We were an hour early for the movie, so we drove a few blocks over the freeway and parked in a prune orchard to wait under the shade of the trees.  There we sat and ate ripe, slightly wrinkled, golden-fleshed prune plums off the trees, finding it hard to stop even after eating our fill.  We declared them the best we ever had, our faces, fingers, and the steering wheel good and sticky from all the juice.  A good plum must be one of the culinary world’s true luxuries and the entire prune industry is based on that French plum. Some of the best one-layer eat-out-of-the-pan cakes I make now, known as kuchen in German, are with fresh plums settled into the top (look for the Fruit Kuchen recipe in my Quick Breads book).

The best-producing plums trees are grafted, a fact learned when Steve and I lived in the shade of what we thought was just a plum tree on Fremont Avenue in Los Altos Hills, then the middle of the orchards.  There are many varieties of mid-summer plums, all maturing at different times.  This unforgettable, almost magical, tree first produced crimson-fleshed Santa Rosas, whose purple-red skin must be the prototype for the color “plum.”  When they were gone, a pale yellow-green one with yellow flesh, a greengage (known as a Reine Claude to the French), appeared.  Then the last batch was a very large, blue-black plum, probably a Friar or Nubiana.  Each ripening was a surprise and each plum tasted, as well as looked, totally different from the next.  In competition with the birds, we ate every one.

Then there was the meltingly delicious summer pear, the Bartlett, named for Enoch Bartlett of Massachusetts.  Brought from England where it is known as the William, pears fared better in our western climate than New England.  Steve and I would drive over to Trimble Road off Highway 101 and forage for the fruit left on the trees after the pickers went through.  It was like trespassing into a foreign land. The quiet orchard had that faint musky pear aroma and the fruit had developed little russet dots and a trace of rosy blush on the yellow skin.  We’d have to be careful with the large ovals, as they were ripening on the tree and might be bruised or too soft.  Pears like to be picked while still under-ripe (pears ripen from the inside out and the cells change when left on the tree, making that mealy texture), but there would still be enough so I would have a nice batch for home-canning and apple-pear sauce. This area now is all commercial real estate and the soil black topped over.

One of my favorite pastimes used to be to look for vacant lots with bearing fruit trees still standing and head over in the evening to pick the unwanted fruit, stepping carefully on tiptoes amidst fallen fruit rotting on the ground. I made countless jars of wonderful jam, ice cream, canned fruit, pies, crisps, and cakes from those nefarious pickings. I would sit outside in the afternoon on an old wooden chair with a TV tray and cut and pit the fruit listening to the birds. Now its just the stuff of memories.

Without a vacant lot in sight, there is still great fruit grown in the spirit of the early Santa Clara Valley available at farmer’s markets, but the seasons are usually short and sweet.

Fresh Fruit Recipes

Small Batch Fresh Apricot Jam (Made in the Bread Machine)

Deborah Olson’s Amazing Cherry Crisp

springtime in the orchard-I grew up with this in my backyard over the fence