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Sliced Peaches
Scald fine, ripe peaches; remove skins, cut in halves and remove stones. Slice lengthwise and arrange in serving dish in layers. Sprinkle each layer with sugar and lemon or orange juice. Chill and serve with cream and sugar.
A simple August dessert with one technique worth noting: the scald-and-slip method for skinning peaches, which the original assumes you know.
- Scalding means blanchingDrop the peaches into boiling water for 20 to 40 seconds, then into ice water. The skins slip off with thumb pressure. Longer than a minute and the flesh under the skin turns mushy.
- Freestone peaches onlyClingstone fruit will not release the pit cleanly when halved, and you will end up hacking at it. Late-summer freestones are what this recipe wants, and "fine, ripe" means fragrant and yielding at the shoulder, not soft.
- The acid is not optionalThe lemon or orange juice keeps the cut surfaces from browning as much as it seasons them. Add it as you layer rather than at the end, so every slice gets some.
- Sugar quantityNone is given. Two to three tablespoons per pound of sliced fruit is enough to draw out juice without turning the dish into syrup; taste, since ripe peaches vary enormously in sweetness.
- Chilling timeNone is specified. An hour or so is enough for the sugar to macerate the fruit and draw out juice; peaches left much longer tend to soften and lose aroma.
- CreamThe recipe means unwhipped cream poured over at the table, not whipped. Period cream came at varying richness; modern heavy cream works directly, and half-and-half is closer to what was sold as "thin cream" if you want something less rich.
- YieldNone is given. Figure roughly two medium peaches per person, so about eight for a dinner of four.
52 Sunday Dinners was built around the calendar, and a dish like this is the clearest evidence of it: sliced peaches appear in August because that is when peaches existed for most American households. Cookbooks of the period treated fresh fruit with cream and sugar as a legitimate dessert course, needing no pastry or custard, and the instruction to scald and slip the skins was standard kitchen shorthand. The lemon or orange juice is the small refinement here, a way for a housekeeper to brighten local fruit.