Peach Pie
Pare and stew a quart of peaches with a pint of sugar, stirring often; when boiled to look nearly as thick as marmalade, take from the fire and when nearly cool, add one tablespoonful fresh butter. Have ready three crusts, baked in shallow tin plates. Spread and pile up the fruit on each.-Mrs. S.T. Peach Pie.
Pare and stew the peaches till nearly done. Sweeten and boil a little longer. Set aside and when nearly cool, pour into deep pie-plates, lined with paste. Put bits of butter over the top, dredge with flour, then cover with a top crust, and bake.-Mrs. T.
Two peach pies from two contributors, printed back to back: the first is an assembled stack of blind-baked shells with thick peach preserve between and on top, the second a conventional double-crust pie. Neither gives an oven temperature, and the first gives a sugar ratio that will startle a modern cook.
- A quart of peachesVolume, not weight: roughly 1.5 lb of pared, sliced fruit, or about five medium peaches.
- A pint of sugarAbout 2 cups, or 14 oz, to roughly 1.5 lb of fruit. That is preserve-strength sweetening, and it is what makes the first filling set up "nearly as thick as marmalade" without any starch. Cutting it substantially will give you a loose sauce rather than something that can be piled up.
- The stacked pieMrs. S.T.'s version is not baked as a pie at all. Three shells are baked separately in shallow tins, then filled; the wording "on each" leaves it unclear whether they were stacked into layers or served as three separate open tarts. Bake the shells fully before filling, and assemble close to serving or the crusts soften.
- Shallow tin platesPeriod pie tins were generally shallower than modern pans, and commonly around 9 inches across; a modern 9-inch deep-dish pan will not give the same proportion of crust to fruit.
- Oven heatNeither recipe says. Blind-bake the shells at 400F until dry and colored; bake Mrs. T.'s double-crust pie at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom, then 350F until the top browns, about 35 to 40 minutes more.
- Dredge with flourA light dusting of flour over the buttered fruit, perhaps a tablespoon, is the only thickener in the second pie. Since the peaches are already stewed and reduced, it is there to bind residual juice rather than to gel a raw filling.
- Cool before fillingBoth recipes have the fruit nearly cool before it is used, though only the second puts it against raw pastry; in the first, cooling is specified so the butter can be stirred in. Hot filling would melt the butter in a raw bottom crust.
- YieldMrs. S.T.'s quart of fruit and three crusts will serve six to eight. Mrs. T. gives no quantities and refers to "pie-plates" in the plural, so no yield can be derived from her version.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish often appears twice in succession under different sets of initials and with contradictory methods. Peaches were abundant in the Virginia Piedmont, and the first recipe is essentially a way of using thick peach preserve as a pie filling rather than fresh fruit. The stacked pie of separately baked crusts, sometimes called a stack pie or stack cake in the Upland South, is often explained by the practicality of shallow tins and uneven wood-fired ovens: thin layers baked quickly and evenly where a deep filled pie did not, though this is traditional explanation rather than documented fact. Butter stirred into the cooled fruit, rather than baked with it, gives the filling gloss and body.