The Brief Life of the Apricot

The first thing to say about the apricot is that the apricot you have eaten is almost certainly not an apricot. It is some other thing — a small, pale, mealy disappointment about the size of a golf ball, picked underripe so it could survive a refrigerated lorry, and arrived at your supermarket in roughly the condition of an upholstered eraser. You bite into it and find no juice and no perfume and a faint sourness that fades into wool. You think: I have never really liked apricots, and you put the rest of the punnet in the fruit bowl, where it sits for several days going slowly grey before being thrown away in a thoughtful silence.

This is not the fruit's fault. The actual apricot — picked at the right moment, eaten within about forty-eight hours of leaving the tree, in a place where the sun has been doing its job all summer — is one of the great quiet miracles of the season. It is heavy in the hand. The skin is faintly furred, like a cat's ear. The flesh is the colour of a sunrise, and when you split one with your thumbs the smell that comes out is somewhere between honey, almond, and warm hay. You eat it standing up, leaning forward so the juice goes onto the ground and not onto your shirt.

The problem is that you have to be where the trees are.

Apricots come from the Tien Shan, the great range that separates Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan and China. Wild apricot trees still grow there, in the valleys that fed the northern branch of the Silk Road, and from there the fruit moved westward in slow caravans over centuries: into Persia, into the Caucasus, across Anatolia, into the Mediterranean basin, eventually as far as the Atlantic coast of France. The Romans had them. The Arabs improved them. The name itself is a small fossil of the journey — praecoquum in Latin (the early-ripening one), al-barqūq in Arabic, albaricoque in Spanish, albicocca in Italian, finally arriving in English in the sixteenth century as apricock, which was thought too rude and was eventually softened.

The brevity is built into the name. Praecox. The fruit ripens before the rest of summer has properly started, and by the time July is in full swing, it is more or less gone.

The country that has taken the apricot most seriously is Austria — which is not something you would guess from a map of suitable growing climates, but is unarguable once you have spent any time in the Wachau Valley. The Wachau is a stretch of the Danube about eighty kilometres west of Vienna, with terraced vineyards on the hills and apricot orchards on the lower slopes, and it produces a particular subspecies that the Austrians have insisted, with some force, is not really an apricot at all but its own thing, the Marille. The flavour is more concentrated, the flesh slightly firmer, the colour deeper. The Wachauer Marille has had a protected designation of origin since 1996, which is the European equivalent of a coat of arms.

What the Austrians then do with the Marille is essentially a national programme. Marillenknödel — apricot dumplings, in which a whole apricot is wrapped in a sweet potato dough, boiled, rolled in buttered breadcrumbs, and dusted with icing sugar — are one of the great peasant dishes of central Europe and one of the great proofs that simplicity, applied with conviction, is more difficult than complexity. Marillenschnaps, the apricot brandy of the Wachau, is the kind of clear spirit that, drunk cold at the end of a long lunch, makes everyone at the table briefly silent. And Marillenmarmelade — apricot jam — is the invisible structural component of about half of Austrian patisserie: glazed between the layers of a Linzertorte, brushed over the surface of a Sachertorte before the chocolate goes on, used to bind biscuit crumbs into the bases of cheesecakes. Without the apricot, the entire Viennese coffee-house tradition would fall down.

This is, I think, the apricot's quietest power. It is rarely the headline ingredient. It is almost always the thing inside the cake.

In Turkey the apricot is much more visible, and in fact has its own capital city. The province of Malatya, in eastern Anatolia, produces an estimated half of the world's dried apricots, and the air around the town in late June genuinely smells of them — racks of fruit laid out on flat roofs to dry in the sun, turning slowly from orange to a deeper amber. The fruit that emerges is kayısı, the dried apricot that the Turks eat by the handful, stuff with walnuts or with clotted kaymakand bathe in syrup as a dessert called kayısı tatlısı, and use as a small sweet punctuation at the end of a meal of grilled meat.

The unsulphured Malatya apricot, by the way, is the dark brown one — almost mahogany, slightly chewy, much more intense than the bright-orange sulphured kind that most European supermarkets sell. If you have only ever eaten the orange ones you have, again, been somewhat deceived. The flavour of the brown one is what an apricot actually tastes like once you have removed the water.

The savoury life of the apricot belongs to the lands between Turkey and Morocco. In Iran they are slow-cooked with chicken and dried lime to make khoresht-e zardalu. In Morocco they are stewed with lamb and cinnamon and saffron to make a tagine that is sweet enough to make a northern European nervous on first encounter and then irreplaceable on second. In Lebanon they are pulped, sun-dried into thin sheets called amardine, and reconstituted into a drink during Ramadan. In Georgia they are pickled. In Armenia, where the fruit has been cultivated since antiquity (its Latin name, Prunus armeniaca, records a centuries-old mistake about its actual origin), the apricot is a national symbol and the duduk, the country's traditional double-reed wind instrument, is traditionally carved from apricot wood.

It is a remarkable cultural geography, for a fruit that most of northern Europe regards as faintly suspect.

And then there is the kernel.

Inside every apricot pit, if you crack it open with a hammer or a nutcracker, is a small almond-shaped kernel that tastes — depending on the variety — anywhere between sweet almond and bitter almond. In the bitter varieties it contains amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that gives bitter almonds their character and which is mildly poisonous in any quantity. Eaten by the handful, it can do you serious damage. Used in tiny amounts, as a flavouring, it is one of the great hidden ingredients of European pastry.

The original amaretti di Saronno were made not with almonds but with apricot kernels. The marzipan-like paste called persipan, still used in cheap European confectionery, is apricot kernel paste, named to distinguish it from the more expensive almond version. The bitterness in a good amaretto liqueur. The faint almondine note in a clafoutis made with unpitted cherries — same chemistry, related plant family. The whole almond-flavour layer of European confectionery is, to a surprising degree, actually an apricot-kernel layer in disguise.

The fruit, in other words, has been quietly doing double duty for centuries. The flesh in one tradition; the kernel, often unacknowledged, in another.

I came late to the apricot. I think this is true of most northern Europeans. You spend twenty years eating the wrong fruit, conclude that the apricot is overrated, and then one summer you happen to be in the Wachau or in Provence or in eastern Turkey at exactly the right two weeks of June, and someone hands you a warm one off a tree, and your entire understanding of what the word means rearranges itself.

It is too short a season. The fruit refuses to travel. It will not be hurried, it will not be delayed, and it will not, under any conditions, be improved by a refrigerator. You have to go to it.

But then — and this is the part that matters — for those two weeks of June, the apricot is the best fruit in the world. The rest of the year, you can have the jam.