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Dried-Peach Pudding
Cut in small pieces one pint of dried peaches, wash them, and boil in just enough water to cover them. When they are tender, add two tablespoonfuls of brown sugar, and boil a few minutes longer, and then they will resemble cooked raisins. Make a stiff batter of three eggs, one tablespoonful of butter, one teacupful of sweet milk, one teaspoonful of soda and two of cream of tartar, sifted in a quart of flour. You may not have to use all the flour-just enough to make a stiff batter. Stir your peaches in the batter and bake in a buttered pan, and you will have a delicious pudding, which no one can tell from one made of raisins. Any other dried fruit may be used in the same way. Serve with butter sauce
A steamed-textured baked batter pudding leavened with the old soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing. The measures are all volume, several of them in vessels no longer standard.
- A pint of dried peachesDry measure, so about 2 cups of halves cut small, perhaps 10-12 oz. Modern dried peaches are usually softer and moister than sulphured, leather-dry fruit, so they may need only a short simmer to turn tender.
- TeacupfulA period teacup is smaller than a measuring cup, about 3/4 cup of milk. Sweet milk simply means fresh unsoured whole milk, as opposed to buttermilk.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder: 1 teaspoon soda with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar is close to 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Whichever you use, sift it through the flour thoroughly and get the pudding into the oven promptly, since a single-acting mixture spends its lift as soon as it is wet.
- A quart of flourFour cups by measure, and the recipe is right to warn you off using it all. Start with about 3 cups and add only until the batter holds its shape on the spoon; a full quart with this much liquid gives something closer to a scone dough.
- Drain and cool the fruitThe hinge. Fold the peaches in barely moist and no more than warm; syrupy liquid thins the batter and hot fruit starts the leavening working before the pan reaches the oven.
- Pan and ovenA buttered 9-inch square or a 2-quart baking dish. The recipe gives neither temperature nor time; around 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until a skewer in the centre comes out clean, suits it. The original assumes you know your own range.
- Butter sauceIn this period the name covers both a creamed butter-and-sugar hard sauce that melts over the hot pudding and a cooked sauce of butter, sugar and a little water; either would suit.
- YieldProbably serves eight. Reheat in a covered dish in a low oven rather than the microwave, which can toughen it.
The selling point here is the last line of the fruit instruction - the peaches "will resemble cooked raisins" and "no one can tell" the difference. Dried peaches were a staple of American home preserving, sliced and dried on trays or strung in the sun through late summer across the South and the Midwest, then kept for winter baking. Puddings of this kind, a plain soda batter carrying whatever dried fruit the pantry held, were the workhorse dessert of a household that could not buy currants for a plum pudding, and the closing note that "any other dried fruit may be used" is the real recipe. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening was in use across a long span and so dates the page hardly at all: commercial baking powder existed well before 1900 but plenty of cooks still combined the two acids and alkalis themselves, and cookbooks of the era print both methods side by side.