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Peach Darioles
Pare and divide into halves sufficient peaches to make one quart. Add half a cup each of sugar and water, and cook until the peaches are tender. Reserve six of the halves unbroken and rub the remainder through a sieve.
Reheat, and when boiling, add a rounded tablespoon of cornstarch, moistened in a little cold water, and cook in a double boiler for ten minutes. Take from the fire, add a tablespoon of lemon juice, a few drops of vanilla, and if not sweet enough, a little more sugar. Beat the whites of two eggs until stiff and dry, and add to them gradually the mixture, while it is still rather hot. Butter six dariole molds, coat with granulated sugar and place half a peach in the bottom of each. Fill about two-thirds full with the mixture and bake about fifteen minutes in a moderate oven. Turn out and serve immediately with sweet cream. If allowed to stand they are apt to fall.
Old teacups or deep gem pans make very good substitutes for the dariole molds.
A Quince Pudding To one pint of flour add two heaping teaspoons of baking powder. Sift together and add two tablespoons of warm butter, a little salt and water enough to make a smooth batter, not too stiff. Stir in one teacup of quince preserves. Bake quickly, sifting sugar over the top when nearly done. Serve with whipped cream well sweetened. - Mrs Kate B. Sherwood.
A hot peach soufflé and a short quince pudding tucked onto the same page. Both are straightforward; the darioles simply demand that everything be ready before they come out of the oven.
- Serve the instant they leave the ovenThe structure is nothing but beaten egg white folded into hot starch-thickened purée, so it deflates within a few minutes. Have the plates, the cream and the diners in place before you turn the molds out.
- Dariole moldsSmall tinned metal molds, usually slightly tapered, holding somewhere in the region of half a cup each. Ramekins, popover cups, or the deep gem pans (muffin tins) the recipe itself suggests all work. Butter and sugar the interiors thoroughly or they will not release.
- A quart of peachesMeasured as prepared halves, not whole fruit: about 6 to 8 medium freestone peaches, roughly 2 lb before paring. Six good halves are set aside whole for the bottoms of the molds.
- Moderate ovenBy the usual modern reckoning somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no figure. The recipe allows "about fifteen minutes"; the tops should be set.
- Folding hot into whitesAdding the hot purée gradually to the stiff whites partly cooks them and gives the mixture body. Add it in a slow stream and fold rather than beat, or you lose the air that lifts them.
- The double boilerTen minutes over water sets the cornstarch fully and cooks out any raw starch taste. Direct heat scorches fruit purée of this thickness quickly.
- YieldSix molds, so six servings, served with sweet cream.
- The quince puddingA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the books are inconsistent; "bake quickly" implies a hot oven, but the book gives no temperature. The batter is a baking-powder pudding.
Dariole is a word of long standing in the English kitchen vocabulary, appearing in medieval cookery manuscripts for small filled pastry cases baked in individual molds; by the nineteenth century it had come to name the mold as well, the tapered tinned cylinder still sold under that name in French kitchen shops, though it continued to name the preparation too. What is served here is really a hot fruit soufflé stiffened with cornstarch, a thrifty version of the classic technique that uses starch instead of a full pastry-cream base and so tolerates a less confident hand. The reassurance that "old teacups or deep gem pans make very good substitutes" is characteristic of American household cookery of the period, which borrowed French forms freely while assuming its readers owned no specialist equipment. The quince pudding beneath it is credited to Mrs. Kate B. Sherwood, one of the many named contributors whose recipes such compilations gathered from readers and public figures; quince, then a common dooryard fruit, was most often kept as preserves because it is too hard and astringent to eat raw.