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Peach Pudding
3 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar Sugared peaches 3 tablespoons milk 3 tablespoons sifted flour Fill a baking dish three-quarters full with peaches and cover them with sugar. Beat the yolks of the eggs; add the sugar and milk; then the sifted flour and the whites of the eggs beaten very stiff. Pour the batter over the peaches; mix all thoroughly together and bake about forty-five minutes. Serve hot with lemon sauce or cream and sugar.
A thin sponge batter poured over sugared fruit — closer to a clafoutis than to the bread-based puddings elsewhere in this section. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own baking dish, so a few numbers are worth pinning down.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Forty-five minutes suggests a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F. No dish size is specified either. The top should be set and lightly browned and the fruit bubbling at the edges.
- How many peaches"Sugared peaches" is not a measurement, and no dish size is given. If you use a 2-quart dish, something like 6 to 8 medium peaches, peeled and sliced and tossed with sugar to taste, will fill it. Filling the dish three-quarters full is the real instruction.
- The leavening is the egg whitesThere is no baking powder here. The whites must be beaten to stiff peaks and folded in last, and the batter goes into the oven promptly, or the pudding bakes flat and eggy.
- "Mix all thoroughly together"Taken literally this would deflate everything you just whipped. Read it as combining the batter components thoroughly before pouring; once the batter is over the fruit, leave it alone.
- Peeling the fruitThe recipe does not say, and many recipes of the period treat peeling as understood. Thirty seconds in boiling water and the skins slip off; left on, they can turn chewy in the bake.
- Lemon sauceA thickened lemon sauce — sugar, water, a starch thickening, lemon juice and zest, a little butter — is the usual sort meant. Cream and sugar, poured cold over the hot pudding, is the simpler option.
- YieldSix modest servings. It falls as it cools, so bring it to the table straight from the oven.
Puddings of this kind — a soft egg batter baked over whatever fruit was ripe — were a common dessert of the American home kitchen. The formula is deliberately elastic: the same three eggs, four tablespoons of sugar and three of flour would carry cherries, plums or berries with no other change. Peaches earned their own entry because the peach crop arrived in cheap gluts in July and August; cooks needed ways to use soft fruit quickly and without a pastry crust.