Peach Pyramid
Cut a dozen peaches in halves, peel and take out stones, crack half the seeds, and blanch the kernels; make a clear boiling syrup of one pound of white sugar, and into it put the peaches and kernels; boil very gently for ten minutes, take out half the peaches, boil the rest for ten minutes longer, and take out all the peaches and kernels; mix with the syrup left in the kettle the strained juice of three lemons, and an ounce of isinglass dissolved in a little water and strained; boil up once, fill a mold half full of this syrup or jelly, let stand until "set," add part of the peaches and a little more jelly, and when this is "set," add the rest of the peaches, and fill up the mold with jelly. This makes an elegant ornament. - Miss E. Orissa Dolbear, Cincinnati.
The mold itself is straightforward Victorian confectionery, but the recipe deliberately flavours the syrup with cracked peach kernels, and that is where it fails.
- The kernels are the problemPeach pits contain amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that makes bitter almonds dangerous. Crushed or cracked and put in contact with water, the kernel's own enzymes release hydrogen cyanide. Cracking six pits and simmering the kernels in syrup that is then set into a jelly and eaten cold is not a safe procedure by current standards, and blanching does not destroy amygdalin.
- Why the period cook did itPeach and apricot kernels were used interchangeably with bitter almonds as a cheap source of the noyau or "almond" flavour. Nineteenth-century books call for them freely, and this recipe gives the kernels only by count -- half the stones of a dozen peaches -- with no weight or measure.
- If you want the dishA current recipe for a molded peach jelly should be used instead. Any almond note should come from a modern extract.
- IsinglassA collagen gelatine made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and related fish, sold in leaf or shred form and dissolved in warm water. It has effectively vanished from grocery use, surviving mainly as a fining agent in brewing.
- "A clear boiling syrup"One pound of white sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. The recipe names no quantity of water, leaving the proportion to the cook; "clear" in such directions generally means skimmed of the scum that rises, so the finished jelly is transparent rather than cloudy.
- The two-stage boilingHalf the peaches come out after ten minutes and half after twenty, so the mold contains fruit at two degrees of firmness. The recipe does not say which goes into which layer, only 'part of the peaches' and then 'the rest.'
- Building in layersEach layer must be fully set before the next syrup is poured, or the fruit floats and the tiers collapse when turned out. This is the only part of the method that still repays care.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions by named women across the Midwest, and the credit to Miss E. Orissa Dolbear of Cincinnati is typical of how the book worked: a compiled community cookbook in which many recipes carry their donor's name, though a great many others are given unattributed. A molded fruit jelly like this belonged to the dessert-as-ornament tradition that ran through the second half of the century, when clear gelatine set in a shaped mold and turned out whole was a showpiece at the table. The kernels are the period detail. Before commercial flavouring extracts were cheap and universal, the almond scent in puddings, custards and ratafias often came from cracked peach or apricot stones, and cookbooks of the 1870s call for them without comment.