Home › Recipes › Delaware Peach Pudding
Delaware Peach Pudding
A pastry bottom, peach pudding filling, and meringue on top. 1 quart of ripe peach pulp. 4 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of corn starch. 1/2 pound of sugar. A dozen peach kernels pounded small. 8 yolks of eggs. 1 small cup of cream, 1/2 cup of peach brandy (optional.) Take ripe peeled peaches and mash with the back of a spoon enough to make a heaping quart. Set it to stew in a bright saucepan with the butter and peach kernels in it; mix the starch and sugar together dry, stir them into the peach, and in about 2 minutes remove the mixture from the fire. Beat in the yolks and cream and brandy. Line two shallow milk-pans with common pie paste, pour in the pudding to be about 1 1/2 inches deep. Bake 20 minutes Meringue over with the 8 whites beaten and 6 ounces of sugar. Canned peaches will do if drained from their juice. When stirred over the fire with butter good peaches turn creamy yellow and remain so.
The pudding itself is a straightforward cornstarch-and-yolk peach curd baked in a crust, but one ingredient puts it outside what can be recommended today.
- The peach kernelsThe kernel is the seed inside the peach stone, and it contains amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed and wetted. A dozen kernels pounded small and stewed into a quart of pulp puts an unmeasured amount of it into a single dish, and brief stewing cannot be relied on to drive it off.
- Why cooking does not fix itTwo minutes on the fire and twenty in the oven cannot be relied on to destroy the compound, and unlike a flavouring infusion the pounded kernels stay in the filling. Nothing in the method removes or strains them.
- What the kernels were forThey were a cheap source of the bitter-almond note — benzaldehyde — used to sharpen stone-fruit desserts. The flavour was the point; the toxicity travelled with it.
- The rest of the recipeButter, cornstarch, sugar, yolks, cream and a meringue of the eight whites is an ordinary construction, and "milk-pans" here means wide shallow pans. If you want this dessert, work from a current peach custard pie recipe rather than adapting this one.
- On the note about colourThe closing line — that good peaches turn creamy yellow when stirred over the fire with butter — is the author's own test of fruit quality, and one of the few practical observations to carry away from the page.
The recipe belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and bakery pastry departments rather than for households, which is why the quantities run to quarts of pulp and eight yolks at a time. Naming a pudding for Delaware pointed to the fruit: the Delmarva peninsula was one of the great American peach districts before disease and shifting production broke it. The pounded kernels are the period detail. Stone-fruit seeds, along with bitter almonds and cherry-laurel leaves, were a domestic route to the almond flavour now bought as extract, and they appear in ratafias, noyau cordials and custards through the century. The toxic principle was described by chemists well before cookbooks stopped printing the instruction.