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Peach Short Cake
Make and serve as for strawberry shortcake, slicing peaches rather fine, or pulping, and letting stand with sugar over them for an hour before using.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have a strawberry shortcake formula in hand and only tells you how to treat the fruit. The peach handling is the whole of the instruction, and it is the part worth getting right.
- What "shortcake" means hereIn American books of this period shortcake generally means a rich baking-powder biscuit dough, split hot and buttered — not a sponge or a sweetened cake. The original gives no dough, thickness, oven heat or baking time; those come from whatever strawberry shortcake recipe you are working from.
- The hour with sugar is the pointSliced or pulped peaches sugared and left to stand draw out a thin syrup that soaks the split biscuit. Skipping the maceration gives you dry fruit sitting on dry crumb. An hour at room temperature is right; longer in the refrigerator works but the syrup will be thinner and colder.
- How much sugarThe original gives no quantity. For 2 lb of peaches (about 6 medium), 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar suits ripe fruit; taste and adjust, since a firm supermarket peach needs more than a dead-ripe one.
- PeelingRipe peaches will usually slip their skins after 30-45 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold. The original does not mention peeling; skins left on tend to stay tough in the fruit's own syrup.
- Slicing versus pulping"Rather fine" means thin slices that collapse slightly under the sugar; "pulping" means crushing the fruit outright, as was often done with strawberries. Crushed peaches make a wetter, more uniform layer, so add them just before assembling or the biscuit turns to paste.
- BrowningCut peaches darken quickly. A spoonful of lemon juice with the sugar holds the color through the standing hour without reading as lemon in the finished dish.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no yield or serving direction. Assemble within minutes of splitting the biscuits, and if you pass whipped cream, unsweetened cream leaves the fruit syrup to do the sweetening.
Fruit shortcake was a summer fixture in American households through the nineteenth century, and strawberry was so much the default that other fruits are often said to have been treated as substitutions — which is exactly what this entry is. The book's brevity is likely a convention rather than carelessness: such compilations are generally thought to have cross-referenced constantly to save space, assuming a reader who already had a biscuit dough by heart. Peaches suited the form well because they were abundant, cheap and highly perishable in season; canning and drying absorbed the surplus, and the rest went into pies, ices and shortcakes eaten the day the fruit ripened. The instruction to sugar the fruit and let it stand is the oldest trick in the fruit-dessert repertoire, relying on nothing but osmosis to make a sauce out of fruit and sugar alone.