Customer Reviews

How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table

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This book serves both as an encyclopedic reference work, and as an informative, engaging read. The author admits that not ALL fruits and veggies are included, however it seems that all of the important ones are, particularly those that we need help with selecting. There is an unbelievable amount of basic information about picking fruits and vegetables, previously unavailable in collected form! Add in the historical research on farming, the updated perspective on farming trends and issues, and you have the ultimate shopper's guide, best kept in the glove compartment (after reading, of course) so that it's always there with you when you're going to market. "How to pick a Peach" should be required reading for every cook in America.

I've heard that the juice of a really good peach will run down your arms all the way to your elbows. One acturally did make it almost to my elbows the other day. Not the kind of peaches you most often find in a supermarket, with only one peach in many having any juice or flavor.

The question is, "How do you select and store fresh fruits and vegies to insure the mzxium excllence in taste and texture?" The answers are found in Russ Parsons' well written book, "How To Pick a Peach." He classisfies each fruit and vegetable by season and not only tells you how to pick the best ones, but also how to store and prepare them. Russ also gives you several simple receipies for using each fruit and vegetable.

Some fragile vegies such as peas, corn and green beans should be eaten right after they are purchased. Some vegies, such as potatoes, onions, tomatoes and winter squash should never be refrigerated. When refrigerated the starch in potatoes turns to sugar and they lose flavor. This was new to me.

He gives an intersting short history of each fruit and vegie. He also gives a history of industrial farming and the cost of compromise when big farmers take over the production of our porduce, which I really enjoyed. Now that I have read "How To Pick a Peach" it will make a valuable referance tool.

As others have mentioned, this book is a nice reference and fun to read. I have tried only a few recipes, but they have all been WONDERFUL. To me, they give the ideal kinds of insights for simple ways to prepare food more effectively which can be extrapolated beyond the exact recipe. After trying the beet/cuc/feta salad, and not having much experience with beets, I continued to make a cold beet salad for my 3yearold all summer, at her request! Also, after preparing eggplant in ways I was accustomed and accepting that my daughter didn't like it, I tried his recipe for steamed eggplant (go figure!) and again my 3yearold loved it! (So did I. It's now my favorite eggplant preparation as well.)

Great food always starts with great ingredients. According to my teachers at the Culinary Institute, the aspiring home cook can make delicious foods simply by picking great ingredients and then not making mistakes in cooking them. The CIA spends a great deal of time focusing on quality.

My paperback copy of How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table by Russ Parsons captures much of that information in a very handy volume. Parsons is a staff writer and the former food editor for "The Los Angeles Times." His approach is similar to that of Harold McGee (see On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, for example): direct, practical, informed and very readable.

Parsons recognizes the reality of many grocery aisles: "tomatoes that taste like cotton; peaches that will never drip; strawberries that could bend a fork." He has written short chapters on fruits and vegetables from apples to winter squash, together with over a hundred recipes. His writing shines: "With its overlapping rows of hard prickly petals, [an artichoke] seems only one step removed from a stick with a nail stuck in it."

The book covers 42 categories of fruits and vegetables arranged by season. The organization is a little confusing, but the excellent Index makes navigation easy and accurate. The index is particularly helpful in distinguishing the several biographies of the ingredients and the practical hints to choosing high quality ingredients.

Parson's recipe for parsnip soup is particularly good and representative of his style:

"This is a somewhat plainer version of a recipe by the San Francisco chef Jeremiah Tower. (He garnishes his version with shaved white truffles.) It's also really, really good with sour cream.

Ingredients
1 lb. parsnips
1 Tbsp. butter
1 onion, chopped
1 medium boiling potato, peeled and diced
~ Salt
3½ cups water, plus more if needed
1 sprig tarragon
1 sprig parsley
¼ cup sour cream

Steps

1. Working lightly with a vegetable peeler, peel the parsnips, then cut off the bottoms and tops. Continuing to use the vegetable peeler, cut away and save the rest of each parsnip down to its woody core, catching the thin slices in a wide pot. The color of the vegetable will change from creamy white to ivory when you get to the core. Discard the core.

2. Add the butter, onion, potato, and 1 teaspoon salt to the pot, along with cup water. Place the pot over low heat, cover it tightly, and cook slowly, "sweating" the vegetables until they begin to become tender, about 15 minutes. Stir from time to time to keep the vegetables from sticking and scorching. If necessary, add a little more water.

3. Add the tarragon and parsley and continue to sweat for another 5 minutes. Add 3 cups water, increase the heat to medium, and cook, uncovered, until the vegetables are completely tender, about 10 minutes.

4. Discard the tarragon and parsley sprigs and, using a slotted spoon, transfer as much as you can of the solids from the pot to a blender. With the lid of the blender removed, pulse to chop the vegetables. If necessary, add a little water. Once the vegetables are chopped, blend on the lowest speed and gradually work your way up to the highest. At first the vegetables will jump up the sides, but then they'll subside and remain at much the same level no matter the speed of the blender. With the motor running, add the rest of the liquid and any vegetables left over in the pot and purée until completely smooth.

5. Wipe out the pot to remove any bits of vegetables, then pour the puréed soup back into it. Heat through over low heat. Taste for salt.

6. Beat the sour cream with a spoon to soften it. Divide the soup among four warmed soup bowls, drizzle in a bit of sour cream in a decorative pattern, and serve.

And here are a couple of samples of Parson's hints on finding great ingredients:

A good watermelon should "sound hollow when thumped lightly." The reason: large cavities form inside the ripened fruit. An additional personal hint: if you buy a watermelon already cut, perhaps covered with clear plastic wrap, pick watermelons with large cavities, not the ones that are smooth and completely flat.

When selecting citrus and tomatoes, go for items that feel heavy for their size; lighter ones will have lost moisture and have a pulpy mouth feel.

"Mature fruit that hung on the tree long enough to develop the sugar will have a distinctive orange cast . . . trust your nose: fruit that is ripe and delicious will always smell that way." In particular, "When you buy [peaches] at the right time of year, however, when the local farmers have filled the markets with them, these fragrant treasures go for pennies. They'll even be cheap enough that you can afford to buy the very best. And that's the time you want to pick a peach."

Altogether, I found this a very handy book to refresh my memory of what constitutes excellent ingredients, particularly handy in the paperback size when shopping.


Robert C. Ross 2008

Believe it or not, I have a writing life outside Amazon reviews, and one of my projects is an ongoing food blog with a heavy emphasis on kitchen science. As it happens, Russ Parsons is, while not one of my go-to authors, definitely someone whose work I like to keep around; his collection of essays and recipes, How to Read a French Fry, is a good book to sit down and browse just to learn dribs and drabs that might be covered in a more firehose-like manner in Cookwise or On Food and Cooking -- interesting, but sometimes a bit inessential. I'd wager I like this one better.

"How To Pick A Peach" covers numerous different varieties of produce, and again, there's a lot of material in here that can be found other places. But Parsons takes a slightly different approach from books like Rebecca Rupp's awesome Blue Corn and Square Tomatoes, focusing heavily on many of the reasons why modern produce is often less than optimal and offering solutions about what can be done about it. In particular, having only been published in 2007, it has a lot to say about relatively recent developments such as the widespread appearances of farmer's markets and their role in keeping small family farmers in business and rare and exotic vegetables and fruits in circulation.

Numerous recipes and sidebars complement capsule histories (sometimes a little too capsule, probably for space reasons) of the many vegetables, and the impact of shopping by variety is explored for such things as apples, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and even cabbage. Unusual history and trivia make up a great deal of the book -- did you know that Japanese-Americans created the modern US strawberry industry, or that the Dutch and Chinese knocked the US tomato market on its ear? Or that the corn that your farmstand sells as "Silver Queen" probably isn't? Or that a town of 5000 in Pennsylvania is the mushroom capital of the United States?

Books like this do tend to suffer from a triage problem -- so much information, not enough room to store it. Parsons certainly couldn't avoid it; I can only imagine the research he left on the bookshelf. And the truth is that given the nature of the food markets and how much they've changed even in just the last ten years, this book probably won't be terribly essential ten years from now. But it'll still be interesting, so grab it while it's still pretty current. The recipes and techniques will still be good, and the information is still pretty awesome.

This book is very interesting. Thank God for NPR or we wouldn't hear about all the great books.

Very informative. I found myself running to my fridge to remove the limes and lemons (which deteriorate quicker in the fridge) and making notes to myself to make sure that I let my peaches and pears ripen on the counter before the fridge. I gasped in dismay when I read I'd been killing my basil in the fridge, although certainly the evidence should have shown me this long ago!

Not only was the book very informative (with four sections broken up by the seasons and exploring fruits/veggies that are ripe for each one) but it also had some great recipes with lengthy explorations of chemical reactions and why the lemon curd is creamy and why Brussels sprouts shouldn't be cooked over seven minutes.

I love this book by Russ Parsons, on a variety of farm fresh items with recipes. This is a fantastic book and I think very highly of the book. My favorite recipe is a salad of roasted beets, cucumbers, tarragon, chives, crumbled feta, and sherry vinaigrette dressing.I'm going to make this beet salad on Tuesday. This is very tasty and refreshing in the summer.

I grew up eating fruits and vegetables from our family gardens or from a local farmer's market. Frankly, it spoiled me. My palate knows what a vegetable should taste like and knows how good freshly picked fruit can be. Because of that lucky experience, I've never really been satisfied with produce from the grocery store. Russ Parson's How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor From Farm to Table helps me understand why.

Parsons, food editor for the LA Times, explains the reasoning behind buying produce locally and in-season. He details the conflict between growing produce for sturdiness in shipping instead of flavor, and it is clear what we are missing in the grocery stores. Within commercial agriculture the author writes, "there are significant rewards for growing more fruit, but there are precious few for growing better fruit." Farmers who have the talent to grow flavorful produce and put in the effort to keep them that way, are almost forced to go outside the normal supply chain, usually farmers' markets to sell directly to the consumer.

The book doesn't include every single fruit or vegetable, but it hits on good number of them. Organized by season, the book includes an interesting short history on each item and describes various farming trends. I was intrigued that several examples of marketplace success of imported fruit altered how our domestic farmers grew some types of produce, especially tomatoes and apples. There is still hope for folks who can't buy directly from the farmer.

Parsons helps arm his readers with some basic information about how to choose produce, how to store them once they are home, and then shares suggestions on basic preparation. I appreciated understanding the science behind how certain growing, storing, and cooking methods contribute to the flavor and texture of my food.

If you start with good ingredients you can finish with great tasting food. This book was fun to read and will serve me well as a useful reference. I'm ready to hit the farmers' markets and pick-your-own farms, but I'm also willing to start telling grocery produce managers what I want to see. [...]

I found this to be a good read, I could skip the parts I didn't need info on and pick up wherever I wanted. I wouldn't recomend this if you are looking for a great book from cover to cover. I keep mine in the kitchen for whenever I need info on how to store a fruit or vegetable. A lot of great tips. It should be in your kitchen along with your treasured cookbooks.