{"id":778,"date":"2010-07-23T21:52:16","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T02:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=778"},"modified":"2013-05-16T09:51:34","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T14:51:34","slug":"peaches-cream-a-taste-of-summer-in-lewes-delaware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2010\/07\/peaches-cream-a-taste-of-summer-in-lewes-delaware\/","title":{"rendered":"Peaches & Cream: A Taste of Summer in Lewes, Delaware"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Traveling is not my forte. I always pack too much, eat bad fast food that I don\u2019t want, and wind up becoming cranky and homesick. \u00a0I like to think this is because I was born under the sign of Cancer (with Cancer-rising, too\u2014the double whammy). This accounts for both my extreme homebodiness and my crabbiness when hungry (and when my edible options are less than desirable). Every Zodiac sign has a body part associated with it. For Cancers, it\u2019s the stomach.<\/p>\n

In fact, if it weren\u2019t for things like farmers\u2019 markets, sweet shops (freshly made ice cream or artisan chocolates, preferably), and coffee joints, you would not want to travel with me. But if a town can supply me with these three things, I\u2019m good.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d have to say, on the farmers market\/sweet shop\/coffee joint scale, it would be hard to rank as high as a town like Portland, Oregon, where I visited this spring. I slurped deep dark hot chocolate at Cacao<\/a> (kind of a chocolate bar that sells chocolate bars\u2014as well as chocolate drinks), squirreled away fresh hazelnuts, buckwheat honey, and aged cheddar from the knock-your-socks off Saturday farmers’ market<\/a>, and treated myself to a cup of my favorite Major Dickason’s Blend<\/a> at Peet’s\u00a0every morning. Portland has a reverence for coffee, for farming, for cooking, and for hand-crafted artisan foods like no other town I\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n

So it is hardly fair to talk about Lewes, Delaware<\/a>, in the same breath. As food towns go, little Lewes is not going to burn a hole in your Zagat Guide. But I\u2019m afraid it would be on Page One of the Susie Guide. It\u2019s a sentimental thing, for sure. My Dad\u2019s family has been living (and eating) in this coastal town for 300 years, and it\u2019s there that I learned to pick crabs, eat corn on the cob with my new adult teeth, make homemade peach ice cream and Beach Plum jelly with my Dad, and dig clams with my cousins. My best food memories are all right there. Or at least they were last weekend when we traveled down to celebrate my Dad\u2019s 80th<\/sup> birthday.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, when I walked down Second St. past St. Peter\u2019s Church where all my relatives are buried in the cemetery, past the old Victorian house my great-grandmother lived in, and onto Ship Carpenter Street and the grassy grounds of the Lewes Historical Society, I got goose bumps. Here was the farmers\u2019 market in full swing. It\u2019s a young market\u2014only 5 years old\u2014but it has caught on strong, and now it attracts growers and food artisans from all over the Delmarva peninsula. I looked around, and it seemed like a whole group of unknown friends had made a secret effort to keep all my childhood food memories alive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Right there was the white sweet corn\u2014the very sweetest, juiciest corn you will ever find anywhere (it\u2019s the Delaware soil, they say). I embarrassed myself by asking if this variety was Silver Queen. \u201cNo, we haven\u2019t grown that one in years,\u201d the (young) kid told me. \u201cThis one\u2019s called Argent.\u201d \u201cArgent as in A-r-g-e-n-t?\u201d I said. \u201cSomething like that,\u201d he replied. (That night, I discovered that Argent<\/a>, however you spell it, is even better than Silver Queen\u2014or at least my memory of it.)<\/p>\n

Stuffing a dozen ears into my bag, I lurched over to the big truck under the maple tree that was loaded up with red bushels of peaches. Peaches! Oh Boy! Real, tree-ripened, fragrant, soft Delaware peaches. Not my favorite white variety (they\u2019ll be ripe next week, the nice folks from Bennett Orchards told me), but a very fabulous yellow variety called Red Haven. Bennett Orchards<\/a> (in Frankford, Delaware, less than 30 miles from Lewes), I learned, grows 19 different varieties of peaches from July through early September, and I am already sad that I will not get to sample the other 18 varieties this summer. (I took my little stash home and sliced the first one up raw and drizzled it with what is arguably Lewes\u2019 true claim to culinary fame\u2014ultra rich, buttery yellow Lewes Dairy<\/a> heavy cream.) This is the way my grandmother Honey served peaches. Peeled & sliced. With Lewes cream. Period. Nothing better.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>By the time we waded out of the farmers\u2019 market (it was 90+ degrees and 75% humidity, so we were literally wading), we also had a wedge of Talbot Reserve cheese from Chapel’s Country Creamery<\/a> in Easton, Maryland, a jar of local honey, and, among other tidbits, a bumper sticker (\u201cNo Farms, No Food\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I figured the farmers\u2019 market would be the highlight of the day, but I didn\u2019t know what my Dad and sister had in store for us that night: a ride out to Hopkins Creamery<\/a> for ice cream. (I\u2019d never been.) On the drive out through the cornfield-lined back roads of Lewes, Dad and Ellie kept talking about the smell of cow poo and the best ice cream ever in the same breath.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Sure enough, as twilight faded, we saw a huge silo looming ahead, silhouetted in the blue-grey sky, its painted decoration of ice cream cones barely discernible. We trolled around for a parking spot and eyed the long lines of folks outside the creamery\u2014which is right next to the huge dairy barn full of cows. We didn\u2019t have to get out of the car to breathe in the familiar odor of cow manure.\u00a0 Judging by the long lines, this seems to be an experience most folks appreciate\u2014knowing exactly the source of their ice cream. But it kept my mom at home in air-conditioned, odor-free comfort. Too bad, as she missed the best ice cream I\u2019ve ever had. After our turn in a long line, I followed suit with Dad and Ellie and chose Cappuccino Delight, a coffee ice cream with bits of toffee in it. (Roy had his favorite\u2014vanilla.) The rich, buttery, full-fat ice cream was heavenly, even better licked off a crunchy sugar cone while watching a new calf lounge in the hay of the open dairy barn.<\/p>\n

What a great trip\u2014sweet corn, peaches, cream, cheese, ice cream. Oh yeah, we did roast a lot of tomatoes and cook green beans, too. It wasn’t a total vacation from (green) vegetables. And I didn\u2019t get a stomach ache; not even once.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nLewes on Dwellable<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traveling is not my forte. I always pack too much, eat bad fast food that I don\u2019t want, and wind up becoming cranky and homesick. \u00a0I like to think this is because I was born under the sign of Cancer (with Cancer-rising, too\u2014the double whammy). This accounts for both my extreme homebodiness and my crabbiness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[11,17,8],"tags":[67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}