Baked Peaches
Plunge the peaches into boiling water to loosen the skins. Remove the skins; cut the peaches in half, discarding the stones, the skins ; cut the peaches in half, discarding the stones, and lay them, cut side up, in a shallow baking dish. Fill the cavities with butter and sugar, a few drops of lemon juice and a sprinkling of cinnamon or nutmeg. Bake twenty minutes and serve on buttered toast or crackers.
A straightforward baked fruit dish; the original assumes you know how much butter and sugar to use and gives no oven temperature. Both are easy to supply.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 375F, which will soften the halves and reduce the butter and sugar to a syrup in the twenty minutes stated. At 350F allow closer to 30 minutes.
- Quantities for the cavitiesFigure roughly a teaspoon of butter and a teaspoon of sugar per half, which is about what a stone cavity will hold without overflowing. The recipe says only 'sugar'; brown sugar will give a darker syrup than white.
- PeelingPeaches at full ripeness slip their skins after 30 to 60 seconds in boiling water followed by a cold-water dip. Underripe fruit will not cooperate and is better peeled with a knife, or simply baked skin-on. Clingstones will also resist being halved cleanly off the stone.
- HalvingThe verbatim text repeats a clause through a typesetting error. The instruction is simply: skin, halve, discard the stones.
- Baking dishUse a shallow dish that holds the halves in a single snug layer. Too large a dish spreads the small amount of butter and sugar thin and it scorches before the fruit is tender.
- The toastButtered toast or crackers under baked fruit is the period's way of catching syrup. Toast it dry and firm, butter it hot, and assemble at the table -- it goes soggy within a few minutes.
- YieldTwo halves per person as a dessert or breakfast dish; four peaches serves four.
- Placement in the bookFiled here under Candy, though it is a baked fruit dessert rather than a confection. In a loose-leaf book, pages could be added and reordered by the owner, so the heading a page sits under is not always a reliable guide.
Baked or roasted stone fruit filled with butter and sugar is an easy way of finishing a dessert in a wood or coal range: the oven is already hot from the main cooking, and the fruit needs no pastry, custard or ice. Serving it over buttered toast reflects a long-standing habit of using toast as a base for anything saucy, from creamed chicken to stewed fruit. The loose-leaf format allowed a housekeeper to add, remove and reorder pages as her own collection grew.