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Peach Fritters
Pare and halve peaches, sprinkle with sugar, and roll in powdered macaroons (or fine, stale cake crumbs) before placing in the frying kettle. When brown drain, roll in sugar, sprinkle with a few drops of maraschino, and serve hot.
PEACH TART No. I Line a pie pan or baking-dish (bottom and sides or sides only) with a sweet, short biscuit dough and bake well. When brown fill with uncooked, sliced peaches; place lattice strips of the paste across the top and bake in a quick oven till the strips are brown.
PEACH TART No. 2 Line dish as above, baking brown; fill with peach sauce or the uncooked pulp; finish with the lattice work and brown quickly.
PEACH TART No. 3 Make as above, either method, substituting meringue or whipped cream for the lattice strips.
A compact group of four ideas — one fried, three tart variants — written for cooks who already knew how to hold a frying kettle and roll biscuit dough. The gaps worth filling are the crumb coating, the fat temperature and the oven numbers.
- Getting the crumbs to stickSugared peach halves are wet and slick, and dry macaroon crumbs will slide off in the fat. Blot the cut halves, dip them in lightly beaten egg or egg white, then press the crumbs on firmly and chill 15-20 minutes before frying.
- Frying kettle temperatureDeep fat at 360-375F. Below that the crumb crust soaks; much above it the almond in the macaroons scorches before the peach heats through. Two to three minutes a side is enough — the fruit only needs to warm and soften.
- Powdered macaroonsThese are crisp almond macaroons, dried hard and crushed fine, not coconut macaroons and certainly not modern soft French macarons. Amaretti crumbs are the closest supermarket equivalent; plain stale sponge or pound cake crumbs, as the recipe allows, are blander but reliable.
- MaraschinoThe clear cherry-pit liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. A few drops is exactly right — it is a perfume over the hot sugar, and more turns the plate medicinal.
- Peeling the peachesDip freestone peaches in boiling water for 20-30 seconds and slip the skins off; paring with a knife wastes fruit and leaves flat facets that crumb badly. Slightly underripe fruit holds its shape in the kettle.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. The shell is already baked, so the second firing is only to colour the lattice — 12-15 minutes, watching the edges of the pastry, which will be on their second trip through the heat.
- Uncooked peaches in a baked shellTart No. 1 puts raw sliced fruit into a blind-baked case and browns only the lattice, so the filling stays juicy and loose and the peaches release liquid into crisp pastry. Toss the slices with a spoonful of cornstarch or fine tapioca and sugar first, and serve the tart the day it is made.
- "Sweet, short biscuit dough"Probably not a plain American baking-powder biscuit: the recipe later calls it "the paste," which points to a sweetened short pastry. Bake it blind at 375-400F, weighted, until fully coloured — "bake well" is deliberate, since nothing after that will cook the bottom.
- YieldAllow two peach halves per person for the fritters; a 9-inch tart of any of the three versions serves six to eight.
Crumbing and frying fruit, rather than dipping it in batter, appears in American and English household books of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the crumbed-and-fried peach is closer to a hot fruit croquette than to a batter fritter. Crisp almond macaroons were crushed for coating, for thickening and for lining charlotte moulds, and their almond flavour was long paired with stone fruit — peach kernels and almonds both yield the same benzaldehyde note. The maraschino finish points the same way: the cherry liqueur of Dalmatia was widely imported and used by the drop as a flavouring rather than drunk. The three tart variants show one technique followed by a short list of ways to vary the top, on the assumption that the reader could already make and blind-bake a sweet paste without being told how.