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Baked Peaches
Pare and place the whole fruit in baking-dish, using sugar generously if the fruit is tart. Add a few bits of butter and half a pint of hot water; sprinkle with chopped nuts and bake till tender. Serve cold.
A bare-bones baked fruit recipe of the kind common in early 20th-century fruit books, where the cook was assumed to know the oven and judge the sugar. Two things need supplying: a temperature and an amount of sugar.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this; the fruit should soften and the syrup reduce without the sugar catching at the edges of the dish.
- Half a pint of hot waterOne cup. It is there to keep the bottom of the dish from scorching and to make a light syrup, not to poach the fruit, so use a dish the peaches sit in snugly rather than a wide one.
- Sugar, unmeasured"Generously if the fruit is tart" is the only guide. For six medium peaches, start at 1/3 to 1/2 cup sprinkled over and into the cavity; ripe late-summer fruit needs less, and supermarket clingstones picked firm need more.
- Paring whole peachesA knife tears the flesh on anything ripe. Dip them 20-30 seconds in boiling water, then into cold, and the skins slip off. Freestone varieties can be halved and stoned; the recipe says only 'the whole fruit', which most likely means stone in, and whole fruit bakes more slowly but holds its shape.
- The nutsChopped nuts scattered on top at the start can darken over a long bake and may taste scorched. If that is a concern, add them in the last 10 minutes, or toast them separately and strew them on before chilling.
- TimingWhole pared peaches take roughly 35 to 50 minutes at 350F depending on ripeness; halves, 25 to 30. "Tender" means a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part, not collapsing.
- ServingServe cold, as directed, with the pan syrup spooned over. Six peaches gives four to six servings; cream or a plain custard would suit it.
Baked whole fruit belongs to the era when a household with a coal or wood range kept the oven hot for hours and used the falling heat for puddings and preserved fruit. Peaches were cheap and locally abundant in season and largely unavailable the rest of the year, so recipe collections of the period offered many ways of using up a glut. The distinction the recipe assumes between tart and sweet fruit points to a market in named clingstone and freestone varieties, many of them now gone from commerce, with the sugar adjusted at the dish rather than fixed in the recipe. Baked fruit was often served cold, since it sets into its own syrup as it cools and needs no ice to be presentable.