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Peaches and Cream
While the first course is being served, peaches should be pared and split, and the stones removed. Lay in a glass bowl and sprinkle liberally with powdered sugar. No fruit should be sweetened till just before eating. Ornament the edges of the bowl with any handsome, glossy leaves convenient, and serve with cream.--Mrs. S. T.
Should never be washed unless sand or earth adheres to them. Cap carefully while the first course is being served, or, if more convenient, you may cap in the morning, but never sweeten till just before eating, as sweetening long beforehand extracts the juice and makes the fruit tough. Set it on ice, or in a refrigerator. No ice must be put on fruit. Serve with cream that has been set on ice. Decorate the edges of the bowl with strawberry leaves. The same directions will apply to raspberries, blackberries, and dewberries. Whortleberries may be washed, picked, and drained, though not sweetened till dinner.--Mrs. S. T.
Less a recipe than a set of rules for serving summer fruit at table, with the hinge stated twice: sugar goes on at the last minute. The passage as printed runs two of Mrs. S. T.'s entries together, so the second half belongs to strawberries rather than peaches.
- Sugar lastSugaring hours ahead draws the juice out by osmosis, leaving the flesh limp and the bowl watery. Sprinkle as the first course is going out, not before.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period that means finely ground sugar with no additives, closest to today's caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will cloud the juice.
- "Cap"To cap a strawberry is to pull off the hull and calyx. The instruction, along with the strawberry leaves and the list of raspberries and blackberries, marks the second half of this entry as the berry recipe, not the peach one.
- CreamPlain heavy or whipping cream, chilled and unwhipped, poured over at the table. Pasteurized cream behaves the same way here; unpasteurized cream of the period may have been thicker and, if it had stood, faintly soured.
- "No ice must be put on fruit"Sound advice then and now: ice chips melt into the bowl and dilute the juice. Chill the bowl itself, and chill the cream separately.
- Peeling peachesFreestone peaches split and stone cleanly; clingstones do not, so buy freestone if you can. If the skins resist the knife, thirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will loosen them, though ripe fruit rarely needs it.
- The leavesDecorative only. If you use strawberry or other foliage around the rim, wash it and keep it clear of the fruit; ornamental garden leaves are not all edible.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough modern guide, one to two peaches and a few tablespoons of cream per person, made up in one bowl and passed.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, includes fruit "recipes" like this one because the difficulty was never the cooking but the timing and the cold. Peaches were widely grown in Virginia, and a dish of them dressed with sugar and cream was an unremarkable summer dessert in a household that had fruit trees and, by the 1870s, access to harvested ice stored in an icehouse or bought for a refrigerator, the wooden ice chest of the period. The insistence that fruit be prepared during the first course, and that ice never touch it directly, reflects a kitchen where dessert was assembled to order rather than held. The berry directions appended here cover dewberries and whortleberries, older names for a trailing wild blackberry and for huckleberries or blueberries, both of them more often gathered than bought.