Enjoy a peach in ways familiar and new | www.myajc.com

The peach, as Atlanta-born food writer Kelly Alexander will tell you, is a remarkably complex and seductive fruit.

Fuzzy, fleshy, juicy and with that signature cleft accentuating the ripeness of its curvature, a naked peach is a bit of a coquette, more of a piece with Ingres’ “Grande Odalisque” than a Cezanne still life. Even more than the cold, waxen apple, it invites you to yield to temptation, to just take a bite.

“I am certainly not going to tell people that if you have a perfect ripe peach at the height of season, you should do anything other than lean over your sink,” says Alexander, the author of “Peaches” (UNC Press, $18), a slim little volume that celebrates the deliciousness of her home state’s most mythic fruit. “That is still the best way.”

And yet in high summer, when Georgia is fairly dripping with peaches, we can enjoy a plethora of preparations — some as familiar as pie and ice cream, others as surprising as tempura and omelets.

In her ode to the peach, one of the latest in a series of single-ingredient cookbooks from UNC Press, Alexander — who grew up in Georgia and now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. — remembers the moment when she fell in love with the fruit. It was at her first pig-pickin’ — an outdoor affair replete with potato salad, cornbread, congealed salads and “just about every other iconic food of the American South you can conjure” — that the young girl tasted her first fresh peach ice cream.

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