Home › Puddings and Desserts › Peach Patties
Peach Patties
Hollow out little stale sponge cakes; brush with butter inside and out; place in each cavity two halves of peaches, pared and fitted together with a little orange marmalade or other preserve in the center. Sprinkle with sugar and chopped nuts; bake until the peaches are tender and serve with vanilla or fruit sauce.
A simple assembly dessert that depends entirely on the cake being dry enough to hold its shape and the peaches being ripe. A few points on vessels, heat and quantities the original leaves unstated.
- What a "sponge cake" means hereSmall individual sponge cakes, firm and eggy rather than the soft American cupcake. Stale ones are called for presumably because fresh sponge tears when hollowed and goes pasty under butter. Day-old madeleines, small génoise, or a firm pound cake cut into rounds all work; hollow out with a paring knife or a melon baller, leaving a wall about half an inch thick.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this: hot enough to soften the fruit and toast the nuts, gentle enough that the buttered cake browns rather than scorches. Expect 20 to 30 minutes depending on the ripeness of the peaches.
- The peaches are the hingeTwo halves fitted together means a whole peach reassembled around a spoonful of marmalade, sitting in the cake cup. Underripe peaches will still be firm when the cake has gone dark, so use fruit that yields to a thumb. Canned halves in syrup, drained well, are a legitimate substitute and need only heating through.
- Paring peachesBlanch 30 to 45 seconds in boiling water and drop into ice water; the skins slip off. Freestone varieties are far easier to halve and pit than clingstone.
- Butter inside and outMelted butter, brushed on, not softened butter spread. The exterior coating is what helps the outside toast rather than sit soggy under the fruit juices.
- Sugar and nutsRoughly a teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans per patty. Nuts on top will darken faster than the fruit softens; tent with foil if they colour early.
- The sauceA vanilla sauce of this kind is often a thin stirred custard (crème anglaise), though cornstarch-thickened versions also appear in cookbooks of the period. A fruit sauce would be sieved, sweetened peach or raspberry purée. Either can be made a day ahead.
- Yield and servingOne patty per person; the recipe scales to however many cakes you have. Serve warm rather than hot, with the sauce poured around rather than over so the toasted top stays crisp.
Peach patties belong to a large family of turn-of-the-century desserts built on leftover cake — charlottes, trifles, cabinets, croûtes — that made a virtue of the stale sponge every household seemed to have. The word patty here is generally taken to carry its older sense of a small shaped case for a filling, the same sense often said to lie behind the savoury patty shell and the patty pan, rather than anything flattened or fried. Peaches appear constantly in American dessert chapters of the period, since the fruit was abundant and cheap in season and impossible to keep.