Baked Peaches
Wash peaches which are nearly or quite ripe, place in a deep dish, sprinkle with sugar, cover and bake until tender.
A four-line recipe that assumes a cook who knows her own oven. The gaps worth filling are temperature, sugar quantity and time.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F, is a reasonable reading. Fruit baked much hotter will collapse and scorch at the edges before the centre softens.
- Whole or halvedThe instruction to wash rather than peel suggests the peaches went in unpeeled, and probably whole, stone and all, though the recipe does not say so. Halving and pitting them shortens the time considerably and makes them far easier to serve; the skins can stay on either way, as they hold the fruit together and slip off on the plate.
- How much sugarFigure 1 to 2 tablespoons per pound of fruit, less for peaches that are genuinely ripe. The point is to draw out juice, not to candy them.
- Why coveredThe cover is the whole technique: it traps steam so the peaches cook in their own juice instead of drying out. A lid or foil is essential, and it can come off for the last ten minutes if you want the syrup to thicken.
- TimingHalved peaches take 25 to 35 minutes at 350F; whole ones 45 minutes to an hour. They are done when a knife slides into the flesh without resistance — "tender" here means yielding, not falling apart.
- Choice of fruitFreestone varieties release the pit cleanly and are the sensible choice. Clingstones will work whole but fight you at the table.
- Yield and servingTwo peaches per person is generous. Serve warm with the pan juices spooned over, with cream, or cold the next day — the syrup sets to a light glaze in the refrigerator.
Baked fruit sat in the middle ground between dessert and preserve in nineteenth-century American cooking: it required nothing but a dish, some sugar and oven heat. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, which first appeared in Ohio in the mid-1870s with later editions issued out of Minneapolis, was compiled from contributions by many housewives and is full of such economies. Peaches were a genuinely seasonal glut in the Ohio valley, and a recipe that scales to whatever the tree gave you and specifies almost nothing suits a moment when the problem was not scarcity but surplus.