Peach Salads
Peaches may be served half and half with bananas, or with almonds (one-fifth almonds), with celery and walnuts, or fine-chopped apple or pear, with French dressing, simple, or flavoured with a cordial.
PEACH SOUP No. I (Hot) Remove skins and pits from twelve ripe peaches and stew the fruit with two or three of the cracked kernels, a cup of sugar, and two teaspoons of sago, till tender and the sago clear. Rub through a sieve then return to the saucepan; add half as much claret as there is juice just before serving.
The salad suggestions at the head of this entry are straightforward fruit-and-nut combinations. The soup that follows is not: it calls for cracked peach kernels, which is why this page carries a caution.
- The peach kernels are the problemThe seed inside a peach pit contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed and meets moisture and enzymes. Cracking two or three kernels into a simmering purée is deliberately extracting that compound for its bitter-almond flavour. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds unsafe, and there is no way to judge the dose in a home kitchen.
- Cooking does not make it safeCooking is not a reliable safeguard -- heat and boiling drive off some of the hydrogen cyanide, but the degree of reduction in a gentle stew cannot be judged in a home kitchen, and rubbing the pur he solids, not what has leached into the liquid. A current, tested recipe should be used for peach soup.
- SagoSago is a starch from palm pith, sold as small pearls; it turns from opaque to clear when cooked through, which is the doneness cue the original gives. Tapioca pearls behave similarly and were treated as an interchangeable substitute in some period cookbooks.
- ClaretIn British and American usage of this era, claret means red Bordeaux, or any dry red wine standing in for it. Added at the very end, just before serving, it is there for colour and acidity as much as flavour.
- French dressing, as meant hereNot the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today, but a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. "Flavoured with a cordial" means a spoonful of a sweet liqueur stirred into it.
- The salad proportionsThe recipe does not say whether "one-fifth almonds" is meant by volume or by weight. Half-and-half peach and banana, or peach with celery and walnuts, are self-explanatory and need only that the peaches be ripe and skinned.
Peach kernels, like bitter almond and apricot kernel, were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century sweet cookery, valued for the marzipan note they lend to custards, ratafias and fruit dishes; prussic acid was a recognised poison in the period, and some cookery and household texts of the era warn about bitter almond and kernel flavourings. The pairing of stewed fruit with a starch thickener and a glass of red wine belongs to a broader family of European fruit soups, generally traced to Central and Northern European kitchens, where cherry and plum versions were served hot in winter and chilled in summer. This book prints salads and a soup under one heading.