French peaches, nectarines and brugnons: how to tell these summer fruits apart

Visit a French market in July and you will see counters groaning under the scrumptious fruit and vegetables of summer.

Among these, I always look forward to warm, ripe peaches that are fragrant, soft and sticky to eat.

However, unless you know what you are looking for, the peach family can sometimes be confusing.

The earliest of the peach’s close relatives to appear is the apricot. Almost 60% of the world’s commercial crop is grown in the Mediterranean basin, with the Rhône Valley, Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur providing most of the fruit for French consumption.

Apricots make wonderful tarts and compotes as well as excellent jam, which can include apricot kernels and vanilla pods for authenticity.

The fruit also gives rise to the expression abricoter une tarte – a baking technique whereby a sweet pie or tart is glazed by brushing it with warm jam.

Shortly after the arrival of apricots, peaches and nectarines appear on market stalls and this is where things start to get complex.

Peaches are the ones with soft, fuzzy skins. They come with white or yellow flesh and are generally freestone – meaning that when you cut the peach in half, the flesh should easily pull away from the stone at its heart.

Why peaches became a royal favourite in France

Peaches became exceptionally popular with the aristocracy in France in the 16th and 17th Centuries, with Louis XIV being a particular fan. He had them delivered from Montreuil, north of Paris, where they were grown on espalier (trained) trees.

The trees were pruned to lie flat against walls, which protected the tender flowers from frost and cold winds, enabling them to fruit so far north.

The technique was then adopted at Versailles, where Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens, established 11 little walled gardens to grow peaches, pears and plums for the king. At one point, 30 varieties of peach were grown there.

You will also find flat peaches, known as pêches plates, on modern market stalls. To me these do not share the delicious taste of a conventional peach, being slightly less juicy and fragrant. However, they look a little like doughnuts, which can be a novelty in itself, and they are easier to cut open and eat, so are ideal picnic food.

Nectarines are the smooth-skinned cousin of a peach. Like peaches, a nectarine can have yellow or white flesh and, usually, the fruit is relatively easy to detach from its stone.

You may come across the brugnon – a fruit I have only ever found in France. 

One popular theory holds that brugnons were developed by crossing a nectarine with a plum. Their appearance certainly suggests that, as they are the size of a nectarine but with terracotta-red skin.

However, they are in fact a natural variant of peaches.

They are much harder to eat than a peach or nectarine because the flesh clings to the stone, making cutting and sharing them a messy business.

They are also less commonly available and regarded as a fruit for connoisseurs, as they have a particularly fragrant flesh.

How to grow peach and brugnon trees

You can easily grow a brugnonier (brugnon tree) yourself in France as they are hardy down to about -20C. The problem is, as Louis XIV identified, that the flowers must be protected from frost.

Flowers appear in March, so plant trees in a sheltered position against a sunny wall.

The trees will not fruit until they are about seven years old.

You can prune them to keep them manageable, or choose a dwarf variety, such as ‘Rubis’, which has been developed to grow in a pot.

An additional benefit of a pot-grown brugnonier is that you can move it somewhere frost-free in winter.

Whether you are growing peach, nectarine or brugnon trees, the pests and diseases that threaten them are the same – peach leaf curl, or la cloque du pêcher, which you treat by spraying with bouillie bordelaise, and canker (le chancre bactérien), a bacterial infection which is spread from one plant to another if you do not keep your secateurs clean.

You can also adopt a traditional French habit and paint the trunks of your trees white with limewash. This deters insects and reflects the heat – so reducing the risk of sun damage to the bark.