What is a cling peach?
A cling peach, or clingstone, differs from the other type of peach, the freestone, in that its pit clings to the peach fruit, it does not sit loose.* Though cling peaches are more difficult to pit, they do have their advantages. The flesh of cling peaches has a nice golden yellow color, and holds up much better when heated. Cling peaches were first cultivated commercially in the US by a pair of farmers in California looking to get rich selling canned fruit to hungry gold miners. Peach canning certainly became a lucrative business. The San Francisco Cannery was at one point the largest peach cannery in the nation. As described by the California Cling Peach Board, most cling peaches grown in the US today still get canned: sold whole, pureed in baby food, or chopped up in fruit cocktail. It turns out that the first cling peach farmer, Joseph Phillips, may have had an interesting time on his migrations from Cornwall, England to Yuba City, California: his family’s adventures, including an e
