2025, Food, home, Uncategorized

A Plethora Of Peaches

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Last week was fraught with baking. On July 26 the peach man arrived. He is a guy from Mott, ND, about 50 miles to the southwest of us who spends his summers driving out to Washington and picking dark red and Ranier cherries, and Cling and Freestone peaches, and driving them back to towns in southeast Montana and southwest North Dakota. He sells them in the mall parking lot in our town. The Freestone peaches are the best. We bought half a crate of them. It was very important for my parents to get a crate of peaches in the late summer and gobble them as fast as we could. I continue the tradition.

The peaches went into paper grocery bags and ripened in three days, all at the same time. It was another mantra in my family that it was a sin to let food spoil, so I set to making peach crumble, peach upside-down cake, and a pasta salad with peach, corn and tomatoes. and we ate the rest on Grape Nuts and ice cream. Husband will eat the remaining four peaches on cottage cheese.

We only buy peaches from the guy from Mott. He will come around in a few weeks with cherries from the Flathead Lake area of Montana. We will get them, too. It is unfortunate that Mott has been known in the area for decades as “Mott, the spot that God forgot”. I have no idea why. I think a more apt description would be “Mott, the spot where fruit is hot”.

What were the important traditions you grew up with? What was the town you grew up in noted for?

34 thoughts on “A Plethora Of Peaches”

  1. Back in the early 70’s, we did a remodel job on the school in Mott.
    What a hateful drive from Fargo-Moorhead! Out of disdain, we called it Mott The Hoople. All The Young Dude’s was their “hit” song written by David Bowie. I’ve never cared for Mott or Bowie.

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    1. my moms dad was a farm kid from hoople north dakota. the center of the north amarican continent. really up northof grand forks but like the middle of north america

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  2. Back in the early 50’s, when major world globe manufacturer, Replogle Globes, was doing their layout, the empty space in the upper Great Plains needed something. There was Mott with its short name.

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  3. You threw me there. I thought my excellent geographic memory was going since I know almost everything southwest of you. My hometown: ore docks and birthplace of 3M.

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  4. I don’t like traditions. Traditions imply an obligation to maintain habits that may or may not make sense and that you might otherwise choose to discontinue.

    My parents used to buy a lug of peaches every summer. They would then have a day of canning them, an assembly line of blanching off the skins, halving them and packing them into quart jars with a sugar syrup. The peaches didn’t go to waste but we didn’t have to eat them all at once, either. Peaches worth canning were predictably and easily available back then, and affordable enough that canning a batch made some sort of sense. I haven’t seen peaches like that for decades and canning them would not make economic sense.

    Nor, if we had an abundance of ripe peaches, would it make much sense to make desserts of them. My tolerance for sweets is limited and Robin doesn’t need to eat three quarters of them. We would end up throwing out half the dessert after a few days, which is no different than letting the peach spoil except more work and a waste of other ingredients as well. I love good peaches but sometimes there is too much of a good thing.

    Robbinsdale, where I grew up, remembers it was the home of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, a lowbrow publication of jokes and “racy” content much appreciated by the swells of the 1920s. There’s a reference to it in “The Music Man”. Robbinsdale’s annual celebration is called Whiz Bang Days.

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  5. I prefer to eat fresh, ripe peaches over the kitchen sink. We had a Georgia Peach truck here recently. My friend and I split a half bushel. I chose to freeze mine. I gave them a quick citric acid bath and filled a few quart-sized freezer bags. I made a peach crumble, but just ate the rest standing over the sink.

    Our family isn’t big on traditions. I’m the only one who tried to keep some semblance of Christmas traditions alive, but it was a Sisyphean task. I’ve let them go now due to lack of any support whatsoever. I’m over it.

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  11. This will sound much like Bill’s story. The grocery store received many crates of peaches and then later pears. My mother and sister canned many quarts. I was not involved. I was out in the fields or workshop. We had no traditions as such. Our lives were ordered my the rhythms of the farm and seasons.

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  13. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Jacque from the “Ice Cream Capital” LeMars, Iowa. This town is also known for being on the frontier and being named after the first six women who stepped off the stage coach: Laura, Elizabeth, Mary, Anna, Rachel, Sarah.

    Krista has the “right” peach tradition–juicy peach over the sink. Yummmm. As a child and teen I helped can gallons of peaches which were delicious. We canned dark red cherries and pears, as well. My fingers would be stained purple for days afterwards. Once we had a freezer, I preferred frozen peaches, though. I am glad to see this tradition go.

    This weekend Lou and I participated in a modified tradition that became very meaningful because of the modifications. A very close childhood friend of Lou’s, Jake, (also a shirt-tail relative) died last fall. He was cremated, then his memorial was set for this summer when all of us old people can gather more easily. This event reminded me very much of our Steve Groom’s memorial gathering that many of us attended 3-4 years ago. There was a meal, including a delectable Norwegian Krengla dessert. Then the friends and family told stories about their loved one. He was a character, so the stories were fun. The next day the family gathered in the family woods, an 8 acre plot of heavily wooded property, where we buried his ashes next to his brother. Others in the family will also have their ashes there. It was lovely and so much more meaningful than a formal church service with draggy, maudlin hymns that I dislike.

    So, to answer the question, I like a good-bye tradition that is modified to meet the moment and the person who died. I find most traditions to be like that–the intention is right, but people hang on to details that are no longer meaningful.

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  14. I don’t recall my mother doing any canning in the summers.. Our main traditions when I was growing up were our driving to either Grandma’s house (Sioux City or Roland, Iowa) for whatever holiday. If we stayed in town, we did our Christmas Eve ride to see the lights, and Santa managed to come while we were out, as we didn’t have a fireplace.

    My first town was Storm Lake, IA, known for, well, the lake. Iowa has a lot fewer lakes than Minnesota, and several of them are in the NW corner – L. Okoboji was about an hour away.

    Then we moved to Marshalltown when I was 12, a bigger town that had the Iowa Veterans Home. And of course, the Marshalltown Bobcats. It was also mentioned in the Music Man, when some character is listing a string of towns across Iowa…

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  16. Well Rochester Minnesota, the only thing you’re gonna think of, or maybe the first thing you’re gonna think is the WFMC.
    World famous Mayo clinic.

    You may say that with some disdain if you prefer … many people do.

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  17. I grew up mainly in St. Louis. Known for quite a few things the unfortunate dread scott decision being one among them. The courthouse still stands. In my lifetime it was the Gateway Arch. Everybody who came to town wanted to go up in the Arch. I think I’ve probably been up 15 or 16 times. The combination of my slight claustrophobia and my fear of heights did not make any of these experiences happy ones.

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  18. i grew up in baby boom steroids of urban sprawl. 13000 when we moved in with cornfields in the backyards of the houses across the street being the western most point that the city extended to. 10 years later 100000 people 2 new high schools 2 new jr high schools. big suburb of a small big town of minneapolis. i didnt know how much i loved it until i went out looking for my spot to land and kept finding that here or there just wasnt quite right until i realized i really like it here

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