Indian Blood Peach
This ancient peach with its startling crimson streaked flesh took on its name because it was one of the Spanish colonial peaches adopted by Native Peoples, first in Central America, the Southwest, and Florida. You could propagate the peach by planting the pits and the variety would emerge relatively true. It was a soft and sweet peach. Because it was a landrace there was a fair amount of variation in its quality: some fruit could be mealy, some could be succulent and fine. All however had a tendency to spoil quickly after ripening. So it was never a shipping peach—a commodity peach. Because the red flesh looked spectacular behind glass, it did gain a reputation as a pickling peach—the sort sold at produce stands.
There are old European peaches that have some relation to the Indian Blood: the Sanguinole and the Sanguine de Manosque particularly. The genetics have not yet been done to establish the exact degree of relation.
A cling peach, the Indian Blood has a flesh color that is yellow streaked with red. The streaks may run from the skin to the stone, or it may localize in strata through the flesh. Sometimes the peeled peach looks marbleized. The size of the fruit varies depending on the crop load of the tree. If the tree sets fruit prolifically, the fruit will be smaller. If not, the fruit can swell to a foot’s circumference.
The flavor of the Indian Blood is acid/sweet with a bold sour under structure to a sugary finish. Because there has been a movement in modern peach breeding to mute the acidity of the peach (in part to satisfy the aesthetic preference of Asian growers and buyers), it has not been much used in peach breeding despite its visual distinctiveness. When canned, the Indian Blood Peach is usually preserved in a simply syrup, the sugar serving as a counterbalance to the tartness of the fruit.
Very few commercial growers of peaches plant the Indian Blood Peach because of its quick perishing. Yet I was fortunate three years ago to visit Hyder Farms outside Landrum to view several trees full of ripening fruit. Dink Hyder plucked one of the branch, and asked, “Want to see the famous bleed?” I sure did. See above.
In parts of the upland South the tree is sometimes called the Cherokee Blood Peach, but in terms of which Native Peoples nurtured the tree, the Muskogee were perhaps the most avid cultivators. Often the peach pits surviving from contact period sites are charred, but the probability is that most of the surviving material in S.E. archaeological sites is some form of the Indian Blood. Because of its historical significance as the “first American peach,” nurseries still supply the variety. Here is a list of some sources: Monticello Shop, Trees of Antiquity, Willis Nursery, Burnt Ridge Nursery. Fruit is sometimes available from the Albemarle Cider Works in Virginia. Most users of the fruit grow their own.