A Tricky Fruit

Apricots are a tricky fruit. When truly ripe, I am not sure if there is any finer fruit but ripe apricots are almost impossible to find. The great Edward Bunyard, in one of my favourite tomes, The Anatomy of Dessert, put it very pithily in 1929: ‘The perfect apricot is not easily come by; too often we find a mealy cotton-wool texture where we looked for a translucent and melting flesh.’ Some things don’t change. The fact is that ripe fruit is a great deal more perishable than unripe and, despite modern refrigerated transport, distributors and retailers are reluctant to handle it. Whereas some fruit – peaches and pears, for example – ripen after picking, it would seem that apricots do not.