Home › One-Dish Meals › Peach Pudding (Pare and stone fresh peaches)
Peach Pudding (Pare and stone fresh peaches)
Pare and stone fresh peaches, or use canned ones. Fill a greased baking dish half full with peaches, adding 2 cups sugar for each 2 qts. fresh peaches. Make a recipe for shortcake, roll the paste to just fit the pan, cut two or three gashes in crust to allow steam to escape. Cover the fruit and bake 1 hour or longer in moderate oven. Cool. Serve with lemon sauce, or with cream and sugar.
This is a deep-dish peach cobbler under a rolled biscuit crust, and the only tricky parts are the sugar ratio and the long bake.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" in books of this kind is usually taken as somewhere between 350F and 375F. At that heat an hour is plausible for raw fruit under a thick crust; if the top colours before the juices bubble at the edges, lay a sheet of foil over it loosely.
- How many peachesTwo quarts of pared, stoned fresh peaches means roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb of whole fruit, a dozen or so medium peaches, though the figure varies with how finely they are cut. Since the recipe wants the dish only half full of fruit before the crust goes on, a dish of about 4 quarts suits that quantity; scale the sugar to the 2 cups per 2 quarts ratio if you use less.
- Sugar, and canned fruitTwo cups of sugar to 2 quarts of fruit is heavy by current taste; 1 to 1 1/4 cups is closer to modern preference with ripe peaches. If you use canned peaches, drain them well and cut the sugar to a few tablespoons, since they are already packed in syrup.
- "Shortcake" means biscuit doughShortcake paste in older American books is a baking-powder dough, not the sweetened sponge sold as shortcake today. Roll it about 1/2 inch thick and cut it to fit inside the rim of the dish rather than draping it over the edge, which is what "roll the paste to just fit the pan" asks for.
- The gashes matterThe vents are not decorative. A sealed crust traps steam from the fruit and the underside turns to paste; two or three good cuts let it escape and keep the bottom of the crust from going slack.
- ThickeningNo flour or cornstarch is added, so the juice stays loose and syrupy. If you want it to hold its shape when spooned out, toss the fruit with 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch along with the sugar.
- CoolingThe instruction to cool is deliberate. Straight from the oven the juices are thin and will flood the plate; twenty to thirty minutes lets them set enough to serve.
- Yield and sauceServes about eight. Lemon sauce of this period was a boiled pudding sauce, typically sugar, water, butter and lemon juice thickened with cornstarch or flour, and served warm; the recipe itself gives no formula.