The Perfect Fruit Page 2

  Perhaps their greatest endorsement had come, in a roundabout way, from a list, this too in Gourmet, of the best one hundred restaurants in the United States. At the top of that list, Gourmet put Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters and company had helped awaken Americans to the pleasures (and pieties) of mindful dining. Chez Panisse had been a pioneer in the practice of sourcing the ingredients on its menu, as a reminder (to those who could afford it) that each element of their dinner had been cultivated by or had itself once actually been a living, breathing body. “Rack and loin of Elliott Ranch lamb,” “Chino Ranch corn,” and “pan-fried Wolfe Farm quail” were not just menu choices. They were branded prayers of thanksgiving. The restaurant was the matriarch of those places, now found in even the most gastronomically barren territory, where the menu changes to accommodate what’s in season, what’s been just slaughtered, and what’s been hauled up from the water. No matter what’s on the menu, it’s always meant to reflect the Chez Panisse philosophy of taking the best that’s locally available, right now—lamb, corn, quail—and elevating, without corrupting, what is essential in it.

  That conviction, so prized by the editors at Gourmet, was especially evident in one item the restaurant occasionally served for dessert. In Chez Panisse Fruit, Waters wrote that “there is nothing more satisfying at the end of a meal than a perfect piece of fruit.” The proof of that came in a simple copper bowl, among the crostata and the profiteroles in the deep of summer: a single Flavor King pluot. It was dark purple, almost blue, and lightly specked with gold. The spicy, sweet flesh tasted of caramel and almonds, and it started dark red just under the skin then bled to a lighter pink near the pit. This piece of fruit had been just picked from the tree at the height of its ripeness, and yet it was uncut, uncooked, undoctored in any way that would seem to justify its role as the finale of a sixty-five-dollar prix fixe menu.

  Some naysayers saw it as extreme even for Chez Panisse, evidence that the primacy-of-the-ingredient philosophy had gone too far. The best ingredients should be a given at a top restaurant, they argued, means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Many more, though, saw the pluot as a masterstroke, a brilliant gesture of humility that was the distillation of everything that made Chez Panisse Chez Panisse. What better way was there to illustrate the singular importance of the well-chosen ingredient than by refusing to alter, which is to say refusing to diminish, “the perfect piece of fruit”?

  I’d made sure to mention all this when I’d called a week before and spoken to Floyd’s daughter Leith. For my girlfriend’s birthday, I told Leith, I wanted to take her to the birthplace of pluots. Leith said she’d think about it and get back in touch with me. When she did, a few days later, it was with directions to Zaiger Genetics. She told me that every Wednesday during the season they gave growers and others in the industry a tour of promising new varieties. We were invited. Next Wednesday, eight forty-five A.M. See you then.

  We were still smiling awkwardly when a woman—the only one in the room besides Elizabeth—walked over. “Welcome to the birthplace of pluots,” she deadpanned. Leith had shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair and was wearing one of those legionnaire-style sun hats with a drape over the back of the neck. Behind her was an old man standing in the doorway to a small side office. In a soft, raspy voice, he said, “Okay, I think we’ll get started.”

  Leith said, “This is my dad, Floyd Zaiger.” He nodded at us, smiling, and said, “Well, I hope you get to see what you came here to see.” The brow of one blue eye was cocked higher than the other, and his bifocals were perched at the tip of his nose. He had on a checkered shirt and a tan cap with a logo for the Dave Wilson Nursery on the front. An unattached pair of rainbow suspenders hung over his shoulders like a harness. A canvas satchel was attached to the bottom of each end of the suspenders and in each satchel, he had a logbook. He walked out the door and got in the driver’s seat of an old white Lincoln Town Car. Everybody filed out of the office, and Leith motioned for us to get into her white pickup.

  The caravan began in front of us, five cars for a dozen or so people, most of them commercial growers who were here looking for new varieties. We slowly pulled behind the office and took a right onto a dirt lane that ran perpendicular to the street. On our left were orchard rows that extended a full block, and on our right was a scattered forest of fruit trees, each one sitting in a blue container tub, like the kind you’d see at a plant nursery.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Those are the female parents for our crosses,” Leith said. I felt a little uh-oh plink around my brain. I continued to look out at all these fruit trees and thought female parents for our crosses, but the words brought up nothing. So I defaulted to a strategy I would come to rely on over the years I spent talking to Leith about fruit. I asked the same question again but in a slightly different way.

  “So what do you do with those?”

  “Well, we keep around two thousand trees in containers to use as parents,” she said. “Depending on the season, we probably cross eighteen or nineteen hundred in the green house and on all those trees, we’ll make anywhere from fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand crosses” on the flowers. To my eyes, the trees all looked pretty much the same—the fruit dangling from scraggly, low branches—but the Zaigers worked not only with plums and apricots, but also with peaches, nectarines, cherries, almonds, apples, pears, and walnuts.

  “We tag each tree with a number and label the containers so that we can know for sure what it is.” I looked out at the forest of blue containers and saw that each one had a number painted in white across the bottom. I was trying to think of something—anything—to ask, but as we came to an intersection of dirt lanes, the caravan was slowing to a stop. Leith pulled the truck into a row of trees and parked. She reached into the backseat and grabbed some brown paper tote bags.

  “You might want to take some samples,” she said, handing us a few bags.

  We hurried to follow her up the row to join Floyd and the other men, who were crowding around a tree filled with large, oblong fruit. The fruit was fuzzy and dark with yellowish specks.

  “I. S. cot,” Floyd said and then rattled off a long sequence of numbers and letters. The other men had paper tote sacks, too. I watched as one of them, a burly man with a big, black mustache, took out a marker and wrote the number on one of his sacks. Like the other men, he circled the tree, looking up at it as if he were inspecting it for something. He plucked off several pieces of fruit, put a few in the sack, and then took a bite of another. Others did the same. Leith pulled off a couple and handed them to us. Unsure of what I was looking for, I took a bite. As my teeth broke through the skin, the juice of the flesh spritzed out onto my sharp blue button-down. But all my attention was on what was happening in my mouth. The fruit was very tart but still sweet, and the texture was fleshy, puncturable. And I was eating it right here in the birthplace of pluots, just paces away from the man many people called the greatest fruit breeder in the world. I looked over at Elizabeth and made a face—big grin, eyes wide, head shaking slightly in disbelief—that was meant to convey something along the lines: “Oh my god! Look what we’re doing! Can you fucking believe where we are?” While I was giving her this look, I glanced over to see the burly guy raise his eyebrows, open his mouth, and not-quite-hock what was in it toward the ground. He dropped his piece of fruit and looked back at me. “Oof, that’s a spitter,” he said, smiling. I smiled back. A spitter? I looked around and saw the others dropping their fruit to the ground. Then, not looking at Elizabeth, I did the same.

  Floyd said, “That’ll do just fine in France.”

  Everybody laughed except us.

  Meanwhile, Leith had sliced a wedge from a piece of fruit and was squeezing juice onto the glass surface of an instrument that looked like the silver-and-black hilt of a sword. “Twelve,” she announced, and some people nodded. “Maybe another week,” she said, making a note in a clipboard she was carrying.

  “Okay. Well. O
nto the next one,” Floyd said.

  As we walked, I caught up with Leith to ask about the France comment.

  “The French tend to like a more acidic piece of fruit. That’s what works better over there, where in Asia you generally find that they like the sub-acids, the ones that don’t have as much of that tartness.”

  “So, was that a pluot?”

  “No, that was an interspecific apricot—I. S. cot—meaning it’s a hybrid of primarily apricot heritage. We’re calling those apriums for now.”

  “So a pluot is three-quarters plum and one-quarter apricot and an aprium is three-quarters apricot and one-quarter plum?”

  “Well, that’s an oversimplification. In most cases, we’ve moved beyond a second-generation cross. So you have to look at the gene tics of a particular variety. If you cross a plum and apricot, you’ve got a fifty-fifty hybrid. But then, if you cross that back to a plum, you’re three-quarters plum, one-quarter apricot. Then you cross that with another plum, and you’re getting different percentages of genes. And we’re beyond even that point with most of these. So it just depends on the genetics of a variety. But yes, apriums are heavier in apricot and the pluots are heavier in plum.”

  I asked Leith about the instrument she was squeezing juice onto. It was called a refractometer, she explained, and it gave a measurement of soluble solids, the concentration of sugars in the liquid. This was called the Brix level of the fruit. The higher the Brix, the more sugar. And for the purposes of these Wednesday morning tours, the more sugar, the better. Twelve was a spitter.

  We stopped in front of another I. S. cot. The fruit on the tree was a faded green color, not especially appealing. It was also rock hard and huge, closer in size to a tennis ball than to the more traditional golf-ball size of an apricot. It tasted sweet but also bland, like weak sugar water. More spitting and dropping. Silence.

  Floyd: “Why, I thought I’d put a zipper on that and use it as a baseball.”

  An old-timer wearing a plaid work shirt: “Or Floyd, you could just sell it as a watermelon.”

  No one kept samples of this one.

  I walked alongside Leith and Floyd as we moved on to another tree. They were looking at a long list of codes on Leith’s clipboard. The codes represented the dozens of fruits we would be looking at this morning. Each code represented an experimental cultivar and had, in its sequence, all kinds of information, including the tree’s location in the 150 acres of experimental test blocks they maintained.

  “We call this our COC list,” Floyd said. “The Cream of the Crop.” He paused and smiled. “We’re very scientific.”

  The Zaigers tried to show as wide a selection of fruit as possible, all the while keeping in mind that what they showed had to be “farmer friendly.” The cultivars had to have the necessary qualities to be grown, shipped, and handled like commercial varieties are grown, shipped, and handled, and a flaw in any area would render a fruit useless for serious farmers. A fruit with an exquisite taste that was too small, too dull, or too ugly might not make it as a commercial variety. A fruit could taste like the gods’ own creation, but if it cracked before maturity or bruised too easily, then it was an unlikely candidate for commercial growers. Just as important as the taste and appearance of the fruit, said Leith, were the set of the fruit and the strength of the tree. Some cultivars were delicious, beautiful and large, but they didn’t produce a high enough yield of fruit on the tree to cover the expenses of growing and picking it.

  Still, flavor was more important now than it had been in the past. In the 1970s and 1980s, some growers would decline to taste a variety because they didn’t consider the flavor to be that important. Times had changed, though. Reasonable flavor was now a prerequisite. What had made flavor a priority again? Part of it was just due to the cycle of the breeding work being done. For much of the period after the Second World War, breeders were working on size, durability, and color, qualities that would help the fruit make a case for itself in the supermarket era. The older, tastier varieties—the ones about which we like to be wistful—were slowly phased out in favor of larger, harder, and shinier fruit. Once those qualities had been established, breeders began trying to work better flavor back into the fruit. Pluots were just some of the fruits of that labor.

  But something had also happened on the growers’ end, and it had to do with apples. For years, apple growers in Washington State and elsewhere favored a big, shiny, highly colored variety called the Red Delicious, which looks good in the store and lasts what seems like forever. One quality the Red Delicious lacks, however, is great flavor, especially when it’s picked too early. Because its skin color turns a bright, dark red before the fruit has fully ripened, picking the Red Delicious too early is very easy to do. The Red Delicious became so widespread—by the 1980s, it accounted for three quarters of Washington’s apple crop—that it drove down not only the price of the variety but also the fruit’s reputation for good flavor. Partly as a result, the Washington apple industry hit bottom in the late 1990s and continued to struggle for years. California stone fruit growers felt that if they didn’t watch it, a similar fate would befall their plums, peaches, and nectarines.

  So on these Wednesday morning tours, the growers’ expectations were high. As we listened to the regulars’ rundown of each fruit’s flaws, I began to understand how high. One aprium was sweet, but orange and spongy. (“Didn’t know you were growing cantaloupes, Floyd.”) One pluot was intoxicating, sublime, mottled, and otherworldly, but it was a “stem cracker.” Another was so sweet it had sugar rings around the top that looked like the wrinkles of a fruit past its prime. Another suffered from pit burn. Everything we tasted had something wrong with it.

  At one point, we stopped in front of cultivar number 142LH560, a plum hybrid that apparently had nectarine in its family tree. (The Zaigers call these nectaplums.) Floyd was looking down at one of his field logs, comparing the fruit in front of him to the notes he’d made about it one year earlier. The other men were circling around the tree, as they’d done all morning, eventually reaching up one by one to pull off a piece of fruit.

  “Well,” Floyd said, “this one’s in its final swell.” Leith was slicing into one of the fruits and squeezing the juice onto the refractometer.

  Silence for a good ten seconds, and I took the fact that no one had immediately lampooned it as a sign that the fruit must not be a total disaster. Plus, somebody in the group was smiling, a field manager for a midsize grower down in Reedley. He had a half-eaten number 142LH560 in his hand, and he was nodding his head and pursing his lips as if to say, Not bad.

  “Fifteen,” Leith announced, reading the refractometer.

  “Fifteen?” He tossed his plum to Leith. “Here, try mine.”

  Leith wiped clean the glass of the refractometer then squeezed out some juice from what was left of the fruit.

  “Now that he’s had his sweet lips on it,” Floyd said, “it’s going to shoot up to twenty-seven.”

  Leith checked the reading. “Nope. Only twenty-one.”

  Leith took two more samples from the tree, and both showed Brix levels in the mid-teens. Sweet Lips had picked himself a rogue nectarine.

  As we kept on through the Zaigers’ orchards, the earlier jokes looped back around. There were more varieties that would do just fine in France. There were more baseballs, more cantaloupes, more watermelons. Floyd began telegraphing his one-liners by smiling wide before talking. At one point, he giggled and then announced that he was starting to “get sugar.”

  By noon, I was starting to get sugar, too. I felt punchy and flushed, like I’d drunk too much Champagne. It was hot out now and I had tasted an awful lot of fruit. I felt like you do on the second-to-last day of a vacation, when you want to continue in vacation mode, but you’ve also started thinking about the packing you have to do and the travel ahead of you. And, to be honest, you’re kind of ready to get home and get back to the grind you went on vacation to forget about in the first place.

  We’d have
great souvenirs, though: Even the worst plums of the day had seemed alive and potent in a way that sad-sack grocery store fruit never did, so our threshold for what made a winning variety was so low that we’d put at least one piece of just about everything we’d tasted into our sample tote sacks, which were bulged and sagging under the weight of the fruit we carried. We’d seek out all these fruits again if we could, but it was unlikely that any of the ones we’d tasted would ever make it out of the test block. We’d have them once more as we worked our way through the tote sacks, and then those flavors would be gone forever. We were raising our expectations of what plums could be in a way that we wouldn’t be able to satisfy again, and this thought was breaking my sugar-ringed, pit-burned, stem-cracked heart.

  The Zaigers always feed their Wednesday visitors, and as we made our way with Leith toward her parents’ house for lunch, we passed back by the forest of trees in blue containers.

  “So those are the ‘female parents for your crosses,’ ” I said. “When you say crosses, you mean . . . ?”

  “I mean, we do what the bees do,” Leith said, “except we’re doing controlled cross-pollination. We take pollen from trees and we use that to make our crosses, and these”—she pointed at the blue-tubbed trees—“are the trees we pollinate.” I was looking at her, trying to concentrate through the sugar buzz. Leith smiled and said, “You know, you’ll just have to come back in the spring to see it for yourself.”

  The next day, I woke and scribbled out my notes from the Wednesday tour. I lined up some of the experimental fruits we’d brought back with us. I stared at them and tried to picture picking each one. I held them in my hand, smelled them. I got a sharp knife and sliced wedges. I ate the wedges and peered in at the insides of the fruits. I took pictures of them, then finished eating them, ruminating. But nothing happened. Before Elizabeth and I had gone to the Zaigers’ place, I’d assumed that our trip to the birthplace of pluots would satisfy my curiosity about them. Now, the fruit seemed to hold any number of answers but I couldn’t figure out the right questions.