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Peaches with Wine
Take four very ripe peaches, cut them in two, take out the stones, peel them, and cut them in thin slices. Put them in a bowl and cover them up until wanted. Put in a saucepan one glass of red wine, two tablespoons of powdered sugar, a piece of cinnamon, and a piece of a rind of lemon. Boil these together, and then pour the liquid over the peaches in the bowl while still boiling. Cover the bowl, and allow it to stand for at least two hours. Then turn into the dish in which you will serve the peaches and the wine.
A four-ingredient maceration that depends entirely on the fruit. The method is sound as written; only the units and a few 1912 assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: boiling syrup over raw fruitThe peaches are never cooked. Pouring the syrup over them boiling hot warms and slackens the slices while leaving them intact; letting the wine cool first gives a rawer, less infused result.
- "One glass of wine"Not a fixed measure; older cookbooks reckon a wineglassful anywhere from about 2 fl oz upward. Take it as enough wine to cover the sliced peaches, and add more if the fruit is large.
- Which redUse something dry and not heavily oaked — Barbera, Chianti, Valpolicella. Modern jammy high-alcohol reds turn syrupy and hot when reduced with sugar.
- "Powdered sugar"In cookbooks of this date this means finely ground granulated sugar, what we now call caster sugar — not confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated dissolves perfectly well in boiling wine.
- Cinnamon and lemonA piece of cinnamon means a short length of stick; ground cinnamon will cloud the wine and go gritty. Pare the lemon rind thinly so no white pith goes in, or the syrup can turn bitter over two hours.
- Peeling ripe peachesVery ripe freestone peaches will usually slip their skins after half a minute or so in boiling water and a plunge into cold. Clingstone or underripe fruit is better peeled with a knife, and underripe fruit gives up much less juice to the wine.
- Boiling the syrupA brief boil is enough to dissolve the sugar and take the raw edge off the wine. Reducing it much further leaves too little liquid to cover the peaches.
- Standing and servingTwo hours at cool room temperature is the minimum; refrigerated it holds well for several hours, though the fruit softens further overnight. Four peaches serve four, in glasses or shallow bowls with plenty of the wine spooned over.
Peaches steeped in red wine are a domestic Italian summer standby rather than a restaurant dish — the same impulse that puts a sliced peach straight into the last of a glass of wine at the end of a meal. The cinnamon-and-lemon-peel syrup here recalls a long-standing Italian habit of spicing sweet wine preparations, a habit often compared to the spiced wines of the medieval and Renaissance table. Simple Italian Cookery was published in 1912 under the name Antonia Isola, and was among the earliest books to present everyday Italian home cooking to an English-speaking American audience. Note that the recipe assumes fruit ripe enough to be fragrant and dripping.