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Peach Pie (Line a pie-tin with puff-paste)
Line a pie-tin with puff-paste, fill with pared peaches in halves or quarters, well covered with sugar; put on upper crust and bake; or make as above without upper crust, bake until done, remove from the oven, and cover with a meringue made of the whites of two eggs, beaten to a stiff froth with two table-spoons powdered sugar; return to oven and brown slightly. Canned peaches may be used instead of fresh, in the same way.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century fruit pie that assumes the cook already knows her pastry and her oven. The gaps worth filling are the sugar quantity, the oven heat, and how to keep the bottom crust from going to paste.
- Puff-paste in this bookBuckeye Cookery's puff-paste is a butter-and-lard pastry rolled and folded rather than the finely laminated modern French kind. Any all-butter pie dough works; a bought laminated puff sheet may slump and soak under wet fruit.
- Oven temperatureStart at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 35-45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly at the vent. The book's silence on heat assumes a wood range judged by hand.
- How much sugar"Well covered" is roughly 3/4 cup for about 2 lb of peaches, less if they are very ripe.
- ThickeningNo thickener is called for, which is period-correct and produces a loose, juicy pie. A tablespoon of cornstarch or two of flour tossed with the fruit gives slices that hold their shape.
- Peeling"Pared" means peeled. Thirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water slips the skins off freestone peaches without wasting flesh.
- The meringue versionBake the open pie fully first, then spread the meringue right to the crust edge so it anchors and is less likely to shrink. "Brown slightly" is only a few minutes in a moderate oven; two egg whites and two tablespoons sugar is a thin, soft-peaked meringue by modern standards, and it will not hold overnight.
- Canned peachesDrain them well and cut the added sugar, since canning syrup already carries a good deal. The fruit is already cooked, so the bake will be shorter.
- YieldThe recipe gives no tin size; in a 9-inch tin, six to eight servings. Cool at least two hours before cutting or the unthickened juice will run out onto the plate.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping first appeared as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book (Marysville, Ohio, 1876), compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox for a local church group; the retitled version followed in 1877 and was issued from Minneapolis. It was a subscription cookbook of a kind Midwestern women's groups are often said to have produced in quantity, and its recipes are written as reminders for cooks who already knew the work rather than as full instructions. The two versions offered here may reflect a household calculation: a double-crust pie kept better and travelled to table more forgivingly, while the meringue-topped version used up whites left over from custards and puddings, which frequently called for yolks alone. The offhand note that canned peaches will do the same job is a marker of the period, since home canning in glass jars with screw-top lids is generally thought to have been spreading in American kitchens by the 1870s, and a cellar shelf of put-up fruit meant peach pie in February as well as August.