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Peaches and Cream (Harder kinds of peaches should) (II)
The harder kinds of peaches should be chopped to the size of strawberries and mixed with sugar two or three hours before the meal. Allow about four ounces of sugar to a quart. Soft peaches, after peeling, are best only quartered or sliced. If admissible, serve them in large glass bowls ornamented with quarters of red or yellow peaches placed in order and a pitcher of cream with each bowl separately. If served individually in saucers, pour the cream over only as they are dished up.
A macerated fruit course rather than a dessert with a recipe proper; the only real technique is timing the sugar and holding the cream back until service.
- The hinge: cream goes on lastCream poured over sugared peaches sits in the juice and thins, and standing on acidic fruit it may begin to curdle. Dress each portion as it leaves the kitchen, or pass the pitcher at table as the original suggests.
- Sugar quantityFour ounces of sugar to a quart of cut fruit is about half a cup to a litre — light by modern dessert standards, and correct. Taste after an hour and add only if the peaches are genuinely sour.
- Maceration timeTwo or three hours draws enough juice from firm peaches to soften them without collapse. Refrigerate while they stand; a warm bowl of sugared fruit ferments faster than you would expect in summer.
- "Harder kinds"Probably underripe or firm-fleshed fruit, often clingstone, which tends to stay firm. Cutting it small, to strawberry size, gives the sugar more surface to work on. Ripe freestone peaches need nothing but peeling and quartering.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skins off ripe fruit. Firm peaches often resist this and are quicker pared with a knife.
- BrowningCut peaches oxidise within minutes. A squeeze of lemon in the sugar keeps the colour through a three-hour maceration without reading as lemon in the finished dish.
- The creamPeriod "cream" here is unwhipped and pourable, roughly today's heavy or single cream depending on the household. Anything ultra-pasteurised and stabilised will taste flat against the fruit.
- YieldA quart of prepared fruit serves six to eight in saucers, four to six in a large glass bowl where people help themselves.
Peaches and cream belongs to the long American summer habit of serving raw fruit sugared and left to stand — the same treatment given strawberries, raspberries and sliced oranges in nineteenth-century household books. The instruction to macerate hard fruit and merely quarter soft fruit reflects a market in which peaches arrived by the basket at varying ripeness and a cook sorted them by hand rather than by variety name. The passage is plainly written for someone plating for a dining room, hence the glass bowls, the ornamental ring of red and yellow quarters, and the separate pitcher for each bowl. Freestone and clingstone peaches were both widely grown, and the phrase "harder kinds" is generally taken to mean clings and underripe fruit rather than any single cultivar.