The Lemon Cling Peach
Yes, you’ve informed your acquaintance from Georgia that calling it “The Peach State” is a misnomer. South Carolina grows more tons per annum—about 60,000—than Georgia and has done so for decades. To emphasize that fact, the S.C. legislature designated the peach the state fruit and proposed a motto, “The Tastier Peach State.” But nobody tags their bumpers with that sticker—not even in Gilbert and Edgefield, the home of many of Carolina’s peach orchards.
We tend to associate peaches with the Piedmont. That is certainly where the majority are grown in the 21st century. But Charleston has its own distinctive peach history, beginning in the mid-18th century with Martha Logan, the botanist and seed broker whose garden and nursery on Trott’s point (think Hasell Street on the Cooper River) contained peaches, nectarines, and apricots that she sold to local residents. Originally all of these stone fruits were imported the population’s insatiable appetite for fruit, for the South had a very short list of Native fruit—paw paw, shadbush, persimmon, mayhaw, sand plum, and wild black cherry. China was the home of the peach, and the fruit had first been carried to the western hemisphere by Spanish settlers. One peach variety—the Indian blood peach—had been adopted by the Native Peoples of the South and was growing on the Carolina landscape when the English founded Charles towne. Logan imported her stock from England, perhaps through Robert Ellis who had direct contacts with China. Sometime prior to American Independence she received a superlative yellow fleshed cling peach of robust growth and luscious texture. Called the lemon peach or the lemon cling, it would be adopted by the city and immortalized in a dish—brandied peaches.
South Carolina’s first cookbook, The Carolina Receipt Book: or, Housekeeper’s Assistant, by A Lady of Charleston (1832), pp. 49-50:
“Peaches in Brandy”:
Wipe, weigh, and pick the fruit, and have ready a quarter of the weight of fine sugar in fine powder. Put the fruit into a saucepan, that shuts very close, throw the sugar over it, and then cover the fruit with brandy. Between the top and the cover of the saucepan, put a piece of double cap-paper. Set the saucepan into a pot of water till the brandy be as hot as you can possibly bear to put your finger in, but it must not boil. Put the fruit into a jar, and pour the brandy on it. When cold, put a bladder over, and tie it down tight.
Timothy Matlack, when conveying saplings of the “Kennedy Carolina” to Thomas Jefferson, said of this fruit, that it is “the most juicy and highest flavoured of all the Clingstone peaches. For preserving it is the best of all peaches. It retains more of the peach flavor in brandy than any other.” Peter J. Hatch, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello, p. 88.
Robert Kennedy, a New Yorker who visited Charleston in 1788, brought the peach to New York to have pomologist William Prince, the greatest nurseryman of the early republic, propagate it at his Flushing Landing nursery. The peach appeared in Prince’s catalog of 1790 under the name it would so bear nationally, “large Lemon Cling”. Early in the 1800s it became a standard tree in the stock of stone fruit nurseries. Here is how Andrew Jackson Downing described it in Fruits and Fruit Trees of America at the time of the Civil War:
Lemon Clingstone.
Kennedy's Carolina. Long Yellow Pine-apple.
Kennedy's Lemon Clingstone. Pine-apple Clingstone.
Largest Lemon. Yellow Pine-apple.
The Lemon Clingstone is one of the largest and most beautiful of all the yellow-fleshed clings. It is originally a native of South Carolina. There are now many seedlings reproduced from it. This is a very productive, hardy tree. Leaves long, with reniform glands. Flowers small.
Fruit large, oblong, narrowed at the top, and having a large, projecting, swollen point, much like that of a lemon. Skin fine yellow, with a dark brownish-red cheek. Flesh firm, yellow, slightly red at the stone, adhering firmly, with a rich, sprightly, vinous, subacid flavor. Middle and last of September. [p. 607]
The Lemon Cling spread to the West Coast after the Civil War and was seized upon by the canning industry. It became for half a century the most popular canned peach in the country. In the middle of the 20th century its place in the orchards of California was supplanted by more productive and more disease resistant varieties. In its old home, Charleston, it had not been grown since the 1880s. The region’s chief nursery, Geraty Seeds in Yonge’s Island, listed 35 peach varieties in 1907. But not the Lemon Cling.
In 2018 Charleston’s chapter of Slow Food decided to fund its restoration, underwriting the creation of a grove on John’s Island maintained by Greg Johnsman. Once again the city’s signature fruit will be available again, using seed stock from Virginia and expertise from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, one of the sites in the United States that grows this historic yellow peach.