Peach Pie
Use Plain or Chopped Paste. For filling use two cups peaches, cut into eighths, one cup sugar, one tablespoon butter, one eighth teaspoon salt, and two tablespoons water.
A bare-bones filling formula from a book that expects you to have already read its pastry chapter. Two things it leaves out entirely: the oven and any thickener.
- Plain or Chopped PasteThese are the book's own pastry recipes, treated in its pastry section; chopped paste generally means one in which the fat is cut or chopped into the flour rather than rubbed in. Any ordinary butter or shortening pie pastry will stand in.
- The missing ovenNo temperature or baking time is given at all. For a fruit pie of this type, a hot start to set the bottom crust — 425F for the first 15-20 minutes — then 350F for another 30-40 until the juice bubbles thickly through the vents.
- Quantity is smallTwo cups of sliced peaches fills a shallow 8-inch plate at best. For a modern 9-inch pie use 4-5 cups, about 2 lb of fruit, and scale the butter and salt with it.
- Sugar is heavy by modern tasteA cup of sugar to two cups of fruit is two to three times what most modern peach pie recipes call for. With ripe summer peaches, 1/3 to 1/2 cup per two cups of fruit is plenty; taste the fruit first.
- No thickener at allPeriod fruit pies were often left to run, the juice soaked up by the bottom crust. If you want a filling that slices, add a tablespoon of cornstarch or two of flour per two cups of fruit, and consider skipping the two tablespoons of water — ripe peaches give up more than enough liquid on their own.
- PeelingThe recipe is silent on it. To peel, blanch 30-40 seconds in boiling water and the skins slip off; unpeeled, they tend to curl into leathery strips in the filling.
- Cut into eighthsEighths of a whole peach are thick wedges that hold their shape and stay slightly firm. Thinner slices collapse into a puree — a legitimate choice, but not what this recipe describes.
- YieldAs written the filling is small, enough for a shallow pie of a few modest slices; scaled up to a full 9-inch plate, six to eight.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, the chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a corporate cookbook of the sort that flourished when American food companies discovered that giving away recipes sold ingredients. Its chocolate chapters are the reason it exists; the rest, including a plain peach pie like this one, is filler in the best sense, rounding the volume out into a general household manual so it would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The terseness here is characteristic of the genre and of the period: pastry is treated once, in its own section, and every pie thereafter is reduced to a filling formula cross-referenced back to it. Peaches reached New England markets in quantity by rail through the late nineteenth century, and a summer peach pie needed no introduction to the book's readers — only a ratio.