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Peach Pudding
Over a dish of pared, whole peaches sprinkle a cup and a half of sugar and let stand an hour. Drain off the juice and add to it a pint of sweet milk, four well beaten eggs, three-fourths cup of sugar, a tablespoon of butter, melted and rubbed smooth with half a cup of flour, and a little of the milk; add a pinch of salt. Pour over the peaches and bake till brown. This may also be made by first baking the peaches with a pint of water, draining off the juice and using as above.
A custard-batter pudding baked over whole peaches, in the family of the clafoutis. The original assumes you know what a baked custard should look like when it sets, so the notes below fill in temperature, timing and pan size.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a thin egg custard with a little flour in it, not a cake batter. Bake at 325-350F; anything hotter curdles the eggs and weeps liquid around the fruit. "Bake till brown" means until the top is set and lightly coloured and a knife near the centre comes out clean, roughly 45 minutes to an hour.
- Quantities and panA pint of milk, four eggs and half a cup of flour, plus the drained peach juice, make a generous quart of thin batter. Use a 2-2.5 quart baking dish and enough peaches to cover the bottom in a single layer. Serves 6 to 8.
- Archaic measuresA pint here is the US pint, 2 cups. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh unsoured whole milk, distinguished in period books from buttermilk or clabbered milk.
- Whole peachesPared whole peaches means peeled but with the stone still in. Halved and pitted fruit cooks more evenly and is easier at the table; either works.
- PeelingThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold water slips the skins off ripe peaches. Firm or underripe fruit resists and is better pared with a knife.
- The macerating step mattersThe hour under a cup and a half of sugar draws out juice that then becomes part of the custard liquid, which is why so much sugar appears twice in the ingredient list. If you drain and discard that juice instead, the pudding will be noticeably drier and less flavoured.
- SweetnessBetween the maceration sugar and the three-quarters cup in the batter this is very sweet by current taste. Half a cup in the custard is plenty with ripe fruit.
- Lumps in the batterRubbing the melted butter and flour smooth with a little of the milk is a period way of avoiding lumps. Whisking the flour into the cold milk first, then adding eggs and butter, does the same thing faster.
- The second methodPre-baking the peaches with a pint of water suits hard, underripe or out-of-season fruit that will not soften in the custard's baking time. Reduce that juice a little before adding it, or the pudding will be slack.
Puddings of this type -- fruit laid in a dish and covered with a thin egg-and-milk batter -- are often said to have been a workhorse dessert of nineteenth-century American households, appearing under names like batter pudding, fruit pudding and, in French practice, clafoutis. They required no pastry skill and no ice, only a moderate oven and eggs. That this recipe sits in a chapter on peaches and apricots reflects the pressure of a short, glut-heavy season: peach growing reached commercial scale in Delaware and Maryland by the middle decades of the century, and expanded chiefly in Georgia after the Civil War as rail transport improved, and cookbooks of the period answered the annual flood of ripe fruit with page after page of ways to use it before it spoiled. The instruction to sugar the fruit and use its drawn-off juice as part of the custard liquid is a small piece of thrift typical of these books: nothing from the fruit is thrown away.