When: July 17
National Peach Ice Cream Day on July 17th pairs two peak-summer pleasures: fresh peaches at their ripest and cold, creamy ice cream. Fresh peach ice cream — made with real fruit, not flavoring — has a floral, honey-sweet quality that distinguishes it from every other fruit ice cream. The peach is also one of America's most culturally significant fruits, with deep roots in Southern food culture and a brief, unforgiving season.
A ripe peach and cream is one of the oldest recorded flavor pairings in Western cooking — Thomas Jefferson served fresh peaches with cream at Monticello as a standard summer dessert.
The peach's name is a geographical error. Prunus persica — "Persian plum" — was named by European botanists who encountered it in Persia and assumed that was where it originated. It wasn't. The peach is native to China, where it has been cultivated for over 4,000 years and appears in some of the oldest poetry in the Chinese literary tradition. The route was China to Persia, Persia to Rome, Rome to Europe, Europe to the Americas. The Latinate name captured one stop on the journey and kept it forever. Spanish explorers brought peaches to the Americas in the 16th century. They adapted so quickly — establishing self-seeded populations throughout the Southeast — that early European settlers encountering Native American communities growing peaches assumed the fruit was native to North America. Georgia claimed the peach as its symbol; South Carolina now outproduces Georgia considerably. Thomas Jefferson grew peaches at Monticello and considered them among the finest fruits available to an...