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Dutch Peach Cake
Make as for German Apple Cake-No. I, No. 2, No. 3.
DUTCH FRUIT MOONS (With Peaches) Make a dough as for sweet shortcake, adding two eggs, or make with sponge. Roll out the dough half an inch thick and cut with large biscuit cutter. Drop on each a spoonful of peach jam or chopped, fresh peaches, and fold over, forming half circles or "half moons." Pinch edges together and bake well. Any fruit may be substituted for peaches.
Two recipes in one entry: a one-line cross-reference to the German Apple Cake formulas earlier in the section, and a complete recipe for filled half-moon pastries. The moons are the part you can cook from as written, provided you fill in the temperature and the fruit handling the author assumed you knew.
- The cross-reference"Dutch Peach Cake" has no method of its own; it is the German Apple Cake recipes with peaches in place of apples, so you have to turn back to those numbered recipes for the dough and the assembly. Peaches release more juice than apples, so peel them, slice them no thinner than a quarter inch, and expect a wetter surface.
- Sweet shortcake doughIn a book of this period this means a biscuit-type dough — flour, baking powder, salt, butter or lard rubbed in, sugar, and milk to bind. It is not the sweetened whipped-cream shortcake of later American usage. The two eggs added here make it richer and more able to hold a seam.
- "Or make with sponge""Sponge" here is ambiguous. It may mean a yeast sponge — flour, liquid and yeast set to ferment before the remaining flour, sugar, butter and eggs go in — which would give a soft enriched bun needing a rise after shaping; it may equally mean a sponge-cake mixture. Either way the alternative produces a quite different pastry from the biscuit-dough turnover.
- Oven heat"Bake well" is all the original offers. For the biscuit-dough version use 400F, 15 to 18 minutes, until the seams are set and the bottoms browned. A yeasted version wants 375F for about 20 minutes.
- Fresh peaches need helpJam behaves; chopped raw peaches flood the dough and blow the seams. Toss the chopped fruit with sugar and about a teaspoon of cornstarch per cup, let it stand ten minutes, then drain off the syrup before filling.
- SealingPinching alone rarely holds a fruit filling through a hot oven. Brush the border with water or egg white before folding, press with a fork, and cut one small vent in the top. Chill the shaped moons fifteen minutes before baking if the dough has gone soft.
- Size and yieldLarge biscuit cutters of this period ran to around three inches, which would give a two-bite turnover holding roughly a tablespoon of fruit. The recipe specifies no quantities, so the yield depends entirely on how much dough you make. Cut four-inch rounds if you want something closer to a hand pie.
- FinishingThe recipe stops at the oven. An egg wash and a scatter of coarse sugar before baking, or a thin water icing while warm, are reasonable additions.
The half-moon fruit turnover runs through the whole of German and Central European baking, and reached American cookbooks by way of Pennsylvania and Midwestern German settlement — where "Dutch" almost always means Deutsch rather than anything from the Netherlands. Peaches earned their own chapter in fruit cookbooks of this era because the American crop was enormous and desperately perishable: the Delaware and Chesapeake orchards, and later Georgia and California, produced far more than could be eaten fresh, which is why a book like this treats peach jam and chopped fresh peaches as equally good fillings and adds that any fruit may be substituted. The cross-referencing style — "make as for German Apple Cake, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3" — suggests a book that assumed a cook who already knew what a shortcake dough and a sponge were.