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Peaches and Pears
To use canned fruit, place in syrup after it is ready in baking dish, fill cavities with pecans, place marshmallow on each piece of fruit and run into stove to season. Serve with meat course. Can be used with whipped cream for dessert.
A two-sentence note rather than a full recipe: it assumes a syrup and a hot oven are already going, and that the cook can judge when the marshmallow is done. A few points fill in what Mrs. Wilson left unsaid.
- "Run into stove to season"This means the oven, not a burner, and only long enough to heat the fruit through and brown the marshmallow. Wilson gives no temperature or time; a hot oven for a few minutes, or a short spell under a broiler with the door watched, answers. Marshmallow goes from pale to scorched very quickly.
- The syrup is borrowedThe instruction "place in syrup after it is ready" points back to a syrup made elsewhere, which this entry does not supply. Canned fruit already comes packed in syrup; drain the halves, arrange them cut side up in the dish and spoon a few tablespoons of the packing liquid around them.
- CavitiesThe hollow left by the stone in a peach half, or the cored center of a pear half. Two or three pecan halves fill it; whole pecans will hold the marshmallow up too high to sit stably.
- Marshmallows have changedMarshmallows of this period were gelatin-based and generally less aerated than modern ones, and sizes were not standardised, so the single marshmallow Wilson calls for may have covered more of the fruit than one of today's does. One standard marshmallow per fruit half is thin coverage; use two, or a jumbo cut flat side down so it grips.
- Baking dishUse a shallow dish just large enough to hold the halves in one layer without tipping. Deep sides shield the marshmallow from the heat and it will not colour.
- Yield and serviceFigure two fruit halves per person. Wilson says only to serve it with the meat course, or with whipped cream as a dessert — the difference is only the plate it lands on.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book is generally dated to around 1920, a time when canned fruit and commercial marshmallows were both cheap, reliable and new enough to feel modern, and cookbook writers put them together constantly. Baked or broiled fruit halves stuffed with nuts and capped with marshmallow belong to the same American impulse that produced marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes: a hot, sweet accompaniment set beside roast meat, served from the same dish. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia press and her books lean hard on pantry staples and wartime-era thrift habits, which is why the entry is barely a paragraph — she expected a reader who already had a pan of syrup on the stove and needed only the idea.