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Peach Cake with Sweetened Cream
2 cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. 3/4 cup rich milk. 5 peaches.
Mace and sugar.
PROCESS: Mix and sift the first three ingredients. Rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers, add milk, mixing it in with a knife. This dough must be soft enough to spread in a shallow, well-buttered pan to the depth of one inch. (Add more milk if necessary.) Pare ripe, juicy peaches; cut in halves lengthwise, remove stones and press halves into dough (cut side up) in parallel rows, leaving a little space between rows. Brush peaches over with melted butter, sprinkle with raisins, granulated sugar and lightly with mace. Serve hot with Hard Sauce, or with cream sweetened and flavored with nutmeg.
This is a baking-powder biscuit dough pressed flat and studded with peaches — closer to a cobbler or German fruit kuchen than a cake. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing you need to supply.
- Oven and timeBake at 400–425F for 25–30 minutes, until the dough is set and browned at the edges and the peach juices are bubbling. A hot oven matters here: a slow one lets the fruit weep before the dough sets, giving a soggy base.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef fat, made by N. K. Fairbank and long discontinued. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening, or butter for better flavor; either should be cold and rubbed in until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
- Rich milkMeans milk with the cream not skimmed off — whole milk, or whole milk with a spoonful of cream. Three-quarters of a cup makes a stiff dough with modern flour; add milk a tablespoon at a time until it will just spread.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins. Roughly a quarter cup is enough to scatter over five peaches.
- The pan"Shallow, well-buttered pan" filled to a one-inch depth suggests something in the range of an 8-inch square or 8- to 9-inch round pan for this quantity of dough; judge by the depth rather than the pan. Do not use a deep cake tin; the dough should spread thin so it bakes through under the fruit.
- PeachesFreestone peaches, ripe but not collapsing, so the halves hold their shape. Press them in firmly — cut side up, as directed, so the hollow catches the butter, sugar and juices. Clingstones are a nuisance to halve cleanly.
- MaceUse it lightly, as the recipe says: a scant quarter teaspoon over the whole surface. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed and is close to nutmeg in flavor, though finer and drier in character.
- ServingServes six to eight, and it is at its best warm within an hour of baking. Hard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar; the sweetened nutmeg cream is the lighter of the two options and can be whipped or poured.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller for the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured Cottolene — a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed from the later nineteenth century onward as a cheaper, more "wholesome" alternative to lard. That commercial purpose explains why Cottolene appears in the ingredient list of a peach cake where an earlier cookbook would simply have said butter or lard. The dish itself belongs to a large family of American fruit "cakes" built on biscuit dough rather than batter, related both to strawberry shortcake and to the German fruit Kuchen familiar from nineteenth-century immigration. Peaches at the end of their run, cheap and fully ripe, are the obvious occasion for it.