Ideal Apricot Is Delectable, Elusive

FOR me, fresh apricots are on a par with the Red Sox. I root for them at the beginning of the season and curse them at the end. (Where anticipation is high, disappointment can be keen.)

Recently, I winced and shivered my way through an apricot whose delicate blush belied its taut muscularity and shrill tone. ''Season's just starting,'' the produce manager said, as if the apricots were fresh from spring training and not at the top of their game. Truth is, when apricot season rolls around, there is no time like the present: as soon as they are here, they are gone.

The qualities I noted in that apricot are, of course, utterly antithetic to the platonic vision of an apricot, a fruit that has, in its 4,000-year history, probably inspired more hyperbole than any other. The ideal apricot, they tell you, almost purrs. It has a soft downy tickle, a honeyed matte flesh cut with a flash of tartness, and a beautiful backside straight out of Degas. Lilting and delicate, an apricot is less outrageously perfumed than a peach and a little more ladylike; you may not have to consume it hunched over the kitchen sink.

Ninety-six percent of the apricots produced in this country come from California, where their season proceeds fairly leisurely: it is off and running by May, peaking in June and coasting to a close in August. Billed as an early summer fruit, shipping varieties of apricot settle in around the country in June, and vanish before they are run out of town.

Most of us never lay eyes on a local tree-ripened fruit. By the time the other apricot-producing states -- Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, New York and Michigan among them -- send their harvests to the farm stands in July and August, most people are not paying attention. (Just as well: there would not be enough to go around.)

As a result, Americans rarely cook with fresh apricots. Many do not even eat them, burned too often by these notoriously bad keepers. I am no exception: one or two lousy 'cots and I hold out for peaches.