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Peach Meringue
Put on to boil a quart of milk, omitting half a cup with which to moisten two table-spoons of corn starch; when the milk boils, add the moistened corn starch; stir constantly till thick, then remove from the fire; add one table-spoon butter, and allow the mixture to cool; then beat in the yolks of three eggs till the mixture seems light and creamy; add half a cup of powdered sugar. Cover the bottom of a well-buttered baking-dish with two or three layers of rich, juicy peaches, pared, halved and stoned; sprinkle over three table-spoons powdered sugar; pour over them the custard carefully, and bake twenty minutes, then spread with the lightbeaten whites, well sweetened, and return to the oven till a light brown. To be eaten warm with a rich sauce, or cold with sweetened cream.
A stovetop cornstarch custard poured over fresh peaches and finished under a meringue. The original assumes a wood range and a cook who can judge a set custard by eye, so the two things worth watching are the temperature of the base when the yolks go in and the actual baking time.
- Cool the base before the yolksThis is the hinge. Three yolks beaten into a still-hot cornstarch pudding will scramble into threads. Let it drop to warm — comfortable to the finger — then beat them in, and the mixture will genuinely go light and creamy as described.
- Powdered sugarIn 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match, and it dissolves well in both the custard and the meringue.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake the custard at 350F, then drop to 325F for the meringue so it colours without weeping.
- The twenty minutes is optimisticThe twenty minutes may be short -- A quart of custard over two or three layers of cold, juicy peaches can take considerably longer than twenty minutes at 350F before the centre is set and barely trembling. Test with a knife near the middle rather than trusting the clock.
- Cornstarch quantityTwo tablespoons to a quart gives a soft, pourable custard rather than a stiff pudding — that is intended, since the eggs and the oven do the rest of the setting. Resist adding more.
- PeachesUse freestone peaches at full ripeness; clingstones are awkward to halve and stone cleanly. Drained canned halves work out of season, but reduce the three tablespoons of sugar sprinkled over them, as they are already packed in syrup.
- MeringueWhites at room temperature, beaten to soft peaks, with roughly two tablespoons of sugar per white added gradually. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which keeps it from shrinking back.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and first issued in 1877, belongs to the wave of American community and household compilations that followed the Civil War. The dish resembles the queen-of-puddings family -- a sweetened fruit or crumb base under a custard and crowned with the leftover whites -- a structure that recurs in nineteenth-century English and American books, in part because it uses yolks and whites in the same dish. The use of cornstarch alongside eggs is characteristically American: commercial corn starch had been manufactured in the United States since the middle of the century and was marketed to home cooks as a cheap and reliable thickener.