Ingredients · Fruit

Peach

Prunus persica · Rosaceae (rose family)

Peach
Dried peach pieces — eleven products carry them, and peach is one of the few fruits whose flavour genuinely survives drying and hot water. It is the summer note in a tea: soft, sweet, a little floral, without the sharpness that berries bring. Peach blends are among the most searched things in this catalogue, which is worth knowing: people go looking for peach tea specifically, where they rarely go looking for apple tea.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromChina
TasteSoft, sweet and faintly floral, with a stone-fruit roundness that survives drying

How to use it

In hot and iced infusions. Excellent cold-brewed, which keeps the floral note that boiling water flattens. In fruit blends with apple and hibiscus. Rehydrates well enough to eat from the pot.

With food

Cream and custard. Almond. Vanilla. Raspberry and blackberry. Ginger. Honey. Basil, oddly but well. Bourbon.

With spices

Vanilla. Cardamom. Ginger. Cinnamon, lightly. Lavender.

With tea

Oolong, whose own stone-fruit note it meets. Rooibos. White tea. Green tea, iced. Black tea for a sweeter iced tea.

Its story

Where it comes from

Domesticated as early as 6000 BCE in Zhejiang province, on the central east coast of China, with archaeological evidence from the Kuahuqiao site near Hangzhou. It reached Greece by 300 BCE and was well known to the Romans in the first century CE; the Spanish brought it to the Americas in the sixteenth century, and England and France got it in the seventeenth. American commercial production began in the nineteenth century in Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia.

What happened

The peach's scientific name is a mistake that stuck. Linnaeus called it Prunus persica — the Persian plum — because European botanists still believed the Roman account that peaches came from Persia. They came from China, six thousand years earlier, and Persia was a stop on the way. The English word carries the same error: Latin persicum malum, the Persian apple, through Old French peche. In China itself the peach means something quite different from a summer fruit: it is the symbol of immortality, and Shou Xing, the god of longevity, is usually shown holding one in his right hand.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip