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Frozen Peaches
For one can or one dozen large ripe peaches use two coffee cups of sugar and a pint of water. Break the peaches slightly, mix with the water and sugar, and let stand half an hour, stirring once in a while to dissolve the sugar. Then add the stiff-whipped whites of three eggs, place in mould and pack in salt and ice for six hours.
PEACHES DRIED No. I Peel very ripe peaches, slice and string them in the sun, or dry on thin clean boards in oven or fruit dryer. Heat as for dried apples before packing away.
PEACHES DRIED No. 2 Peel and slice thin ripe fruit, spread on dishes, sprinkle over the slices granulated sugar, and set in moderate oven till the peaches are hot, when dry slowly in the sun or cool oven.
Peaches may also be dried as are cherries with syrup.
Three separate methods are run together here: a still-frozen peach dessert, and two ways of drying the fruit. The frozen one cannot be made as printed, for the reason given first.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whipped whites of three eggs go into the mould uncooked and stay uncooked; packing in salt and ice for six hours holds the mixture at or below freezing, which suspends bacterial growth but kills nothing. Freezing does not destroy Salmonella, and the whites are eaten as they went in. Use a current recipe for frozen mousse or semifreddo, one built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- A coffee cup is not a measuring cupNineteenth-century coffee cups varied in size and the book gives no standard, so the sugar quantity is only approximate. Two of them plus a pint of water is a very sweet syrup by modern taste in any reading of it.
- "Pack in salt and ice"This is the pre-mechanical freezer: a covered metal mould buried in a tub of crushed ice mixed with coarse salt, roughly one part salt to three or four of ice, which drops the brine well below 32F. Six hours reflects how slowly a still-frozen mould sets without churning.
- "Break the peaches slightly"Not puréed — crushed by hand or with a masher so the fruit gives up juice and the sugar has something to dissolve into. The half-hour stand is for the sugar, not the fruit.
- "Moderate oven" in the drying recipesA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F, and here it is only used to heat the sugared slices through before they go out to finish slowly. For the drying itself, modern practice is a very low oven, 140-160F, with the door propped, or a dehydrator; the book's "cool oven" would have run hotter than that.
- "Heat as for dried apples before packing away"A pasteurizing step: the finished dried fruit was warmed through in the oven to kill insect eggs and surface mould before it went into crocks or bags. Modern practice is the same idea in reverse — freezing the dried fruit for several days.
- Open-air sun dryingStringing peaches in the sun works in a hot, dry, low-humidity climate and not much elsewhere; in humid weather the slices mould before they dehydrate. Peaches also brown heavily without a dip in acidulated water or an ascorbic-acid solution.
Frozen fruit desserts stiffened with whipped egg white were a standard summer item in American household books of the late nineteenth century, sitting between the water ice and the true ice cream: no custard, no churn, just fruit, syrup and beaten whites set in a mould buried in salt and ice. They depended on the ice trade, which by the 1880s is generally said to have put harvested lake and river ice into iceboxes in many ordinary town households, and they went out of fashion for reasons usually traced to the arrival of the mechanical refrigerator and a declining taste for raw-white confections. The two drying methods beside it belong to an older and more practical tradition of dried fruits, sliced and spread on boards or strung on thread, and the sugared version in No. 2 is essentially a cheap route to the candied dried fruit that was otherwise made with a full syrup, as the closing line about cherries acknowledges.