Peach Puffs
In place of pie crust, a short biscuit dough may be used for fruit dumplings; this will be found superior to cake when a nice fruit short cake is desired. For peach puffs, beat 2 eggs until thick and light; add ½ of a cupful of milk, a pinch of salt and 1 cupful of flour mixed with I heaping teaspoonful of bakingpowder. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of melted butter and beat well; then add as much more flour as may be necessary to mix it to a thick batter.
Butter small, deep cups; drop in each I spoonful of the batter; add to each ½ of a peeled peach; cover with another spoonful of batter and steam for half an hour. Either hard or soft sauce may be served with this dessert.
A steamed individual pudding, closer to a light dumpling than a cake. The batter should be thick enough to hold the peach half in place rather than let it sink.
- Batter consistency is the hingeThe recipe deliberately leaves the second flour addition open: add just enough that the batter mounds on the spoon and does not run. Too thin and the peach settles to the bottom and the puff collapses when unmoulded.
- Cups and moulds"Small, deep cups" means teacups, custard cups or dariole moulds of about 5-6 fl oz. Butter them generously and fill no more than two-thirds full, since baking powder batter climbs as it steams. Ramekins work but the wider shape gives a flatter result.
- How to steamStand the cups on a rack in a covered pot with simmering water reaching halfway up their sides, or in a steamer basket. Cover each cup loosely with foil or a square of buttered paper so condensation does not pool on the batter.
- TimingHalf an hour is right for cups this size; a skewer should come out clean. Keep the water at a steady simmer rather than a hard boil, and top up with boiling water if it drops.
- MeasuresHalf a cupful of milk and one cupful of flour, read as standard modern cups, are 120 ml and about 125 g. One heaping teaspoon of baking powder is roughly 1½ level teaspoons, generous in itself, though the recipe then calls for more flour, so the final leavening ratio is lower than it first appears.
- PeachesPeel by blanching 30 seconds in boiling water. Firm-ripe fruit holds its shape; very soft peaches disintegrate into the batter. Well-drained tinned halves are an acceptable substitute out of season.
- The sauces"Hard sauce" is butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavouring, served cold so it melts over the hot pudding. "Soft sauce" in books of this period means a thin pourable sauce, usually butter, sugar and milk or a little cream, sometimes thickened with a spoonful of flour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities should fill roughly six small cups, or four larger ones. They are best unmoulded and eaten straight from the steamer; reheat leftovers briefly by steaming again rather than in the oven.
Steamed puddings in individual cups suited a stovetop: no oven need be heated, and a single pot with a rack could turn out dessert for a family while the rest of the meal cooked. The opening note about substituting biscuit dough for pie crust reflects the quickly mixed baking-powder doughs common in American kitchens of the period, in place of more butter-hungry pastry. Hard sauce, the cold creamed butter-and-sugar accompaniment named for its firmness rather than any harshness, is generally traced to English pudding traditions and appears widely with steamed desserts in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century.