Home › The Principles of Cookery › Peach Pie
Peach Pie
Peel, stone, and slice some peaches. Line a shallow pie-dish with a good short crust, and fill it with the sliced fruit. Sprinkle with sugar. Crack one or two of the peach stones, and place the kernels among the peaches. Cut some of the paste into strips, and place these crosswise over the peaches. Bake for forty minutes in a quick oven. Serve with cream.
A single-crust fruit pie with a lattice top, written for cooks who were expected to know their own pastry. The gaps are quantities, oven heat, and what to do about the juice.
- The peach kernelsPeach stones contain amygdalin, which on being crushed or moistened breaks down to release hydrogen cyanide along with benzaldehyde, the compound responsible for the bitter-almond flavour cooks were after. Leave them out and use a few drops of almond extract or a spoonful of ground almonds instead, which gives the flavour without the toxin.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. That heat is deliberate: it sets the pastry before the fruit floods it. Bake on a preheated baking sheet on a low shelf so the base browns.
- Forty minutesCorrect for a shallow dish at that heat, but check at 30 minutes. The pie is done when the strips are deep gold and the juice bubbles thickly at the edges rather than running thin.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch shallow dish, about 2 lb of peaches (6-8 medium) and 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar, depending on ripeness. The original leaves both to the cook's eye.
- The juice problemRipe peaches release a great deal of liquid and the recipe gives no thickener. Toss the slices with a tablespoon of cornflour or two of flour along with the sugar, or macerate them for 30 minutes and drain off the excess before filling.
- "Good short crust"A plain shortcrust of 2 parts flour to 1 part fat by weight, water only to bind. Not sweet pastry and not puff; the strips laid crosswise want something that holds its shape.
- PeelingBlanch 30-40 seconds in boiling water and drop into cold; the skins slip off ripe fruit easily. Freestone peaches also part cleanly from the pit; clingstone varieties do not, and are better cut in wedges away from the pit.
- ServingServes six to eight. "Cream" here means unwhipped pouring cream, served cold over a warm slice.
Cassell's gives the recipe at a time when English peaches were largely a walled-garden and glasshouse crop, expensive enough that a pie of them was a statement; imported and tinned fruit later made the dish ordinary. The instruction to crack a stone and bury the kernel in the fruit is the oldest thing on the page: cooks had used peach and apricot kernels, bitter almonds and laurel leaves interchangeably for a century and more to give custards, creams and fruit dishes what recipe writers called a "ratafia" flavour. The practice faded through the twentieth century as commercial almond essence became cheap, and modern editions of comparable recipes simply call for the extract.