Home › Fancy Dishes › Peaches and Cream
Peaches and Cream
Peel soft ripe peaches, quarter the fruit; put a layer of peaches in dish, then sprinkle thick with sugar, alternate in this way until the desired quantity is prepared. Sprinkle a very heavy coat of fine sugar on top of fruit; set the dish on ice an hour or two before using; serve in small dishes and and eat with sweet, rich cream.
A maceration rather than a cooked dish, and it lives or dies on the fruit. The instructions assume a household with a block of ice and a dairy that delivered unhomogenized cream.
- The hinge: fruit ripenessNothing here disguises an underripe peach. Use fruit that yields to a thumb at the shoulder and smells of peach through the skin; freestone varieties quarter cleanly away from the pit.
- PeelingA ripe peach will often skin with a paring knife alone. If not, thirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skin without cooking the flesh.
- "Fine sugar"Superfine or caster sugar, which dissolves into the peach juices instead of sitting gritty on the fruit. Granulated works if left the full two hours.
- How much sugar"Thick" and "a very heavy coat" reflect a period taste for heavily sugared fruit. For modern dessert peaches, 1 to 2 tablespoons per pound of fruit is plenty, and the point is to draw out juice rather than to sweeten.
- "Set the dish on ice"Refrigerate, covered, for one to two hours. Longer than three and the quarters slump and lose their bite.
- "Sweet, rich cream"Sweet means unsoured, not sugared; rich means high fat. Heavy or whipping cream poured over unwhipped is what was intended. Avoid ultra-pasteurized if you can find an alternative, as it carries a faint cooked flavor.
- YieldAbout 6 medium peaches serves four in the "small dishes" the recipe specifies. Assemble in a glass bowl if you want the layers visible.
- Metal and fruitUse glass, china or stainless. Acidic macerating fruit in a reactive bowl picks up a metallic edge over two hours.
Peaches and cream was a byword for ease and abundance in nineteenth-century America, and the phrase had passed into idiom by roughly this period — a dish that leans less on technique than on good raw materials. The instruction to set the dish on ice is a small piece of domestic history in itself: household ice, cut in winter from northern lakes and ponds and stored in insulated icehouses, was delivered by wagon and helped make this kind of chilled uncooked dessert practical in ordinary homes. The cream would have come from a dairy in a can or bottle, unhomogenized, with the top layer skimmed for table use, and it was worth specifying as "sweet" because cream that had begun to turn was a routine part of kitchen life. Peaches themselves were a summer glut crop across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, which is one reason books of the period give them raw, macerated, pickled and preserved within a few pages of each other.