Home › Luncheon Dishes › Deep-Dish Peach Pie
Deep-Dish Peach Pie
Fill baking dish 2/3 full of sliced peaches. Pour cake-batter over top and bake 30 minutes. For batter, use 1 C flour, sifted with 1 t baking powder Beat 1 egg, gradually beat in 1/2 C sugar Add flour and ¼ C milk alternately. Mix, add 3 T melted butter, and 1/2 t lemon flavoring. 12 t lemon flavoring.
Mrs. Fern Gover. 2 egg yolks ½ C milk 1 T cornstarch
A cobbler in all but name: sliced fruit under a thin butter cake batter that sets into a soft crust as it bakes. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own baking dish, so a few numbers are worth filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350F; the batter needs 30 to 35 minutes to set through and colour, and a hotter oven browns the top before the centre is done.
- Dish sizeAn 8-inch square or a 1.5-quart baking dish is about the right scale for one cup of flour. Two-thirds full of sliced peaches is something in the region of 4 to 5 cups of fruit, or roughly 5 to 6 medium peaches.
- The milk quantityThe batter calls for a quarter cup of milk against one cup of flour, and the printed page reads the same. That gives the thick, spoonable batter this style of pudding-cake needs, stiff enough to spread over the fruit rather than sink into it.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. Sifting the baking powder through the flour matters here because the batter is mixed briefly and has little other lift beyond the beaten egg.
- Lemon flavoringThis means bottled lemon extract, stronger than juice. Half a teaspoon is right; the grated zest of half a lemon substitutes well.
- PeachesPeel them " a 30-second dip in boiling water slips the skins " or the skins toughen into strips under the batter. Very juicy freestones benefit from a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch tossed through, or the bottom stays soupy.
- Judging donenessThe batter should be set and golden and a skewer in the cake layer should come out clean. The fruit underneath will be bubbling at the edges.
- YieldServes 6. Best warm, within an hour or two of baking, with cream.
Church and society cook books of the early twentieth century are full of these batter-over-fruit puddings, filed variously as cobbler, sponge pie, or -- as here -- deep-dish pie. The appeal was practical: no pastry to roll, no blind baking, and a batter built from things always on hand.