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Peaches and Cream (Harder kinds of peaches should)
The harder kinds of peaches should be chopped to the size of strawberries and mixed with sugar 2 or 3 hours before the meal. Allow about 4 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.
Once we read in the Atlantic Monthly a series of articles in which all such questions as the preceding were asked with the intent of advising a system of cooperative housekeeping under which the fifteen household martyrs, one for each of the said fifteen families, instead of all suffering at once should take turn and turn about doing the work of each department for the entire co-operating community. It is a good many years ago, but we remember thinking then that the only practicable form of co-operative housekeeping is the American hotel system, modified perhaps in the matters of wider separation of rooms and of individual freedom.
A method rather than a formula: the whole thing turns on matching the cut to the ripeness of the fruit, and on when the cream meets the peaches.
- The hingeHard fruit is chopped small and sugared two to three hours ahead so the sugar draws out juice and softens it; soft fruit is cut large and left alone. Chopping a ripe peach fine and letting it sit turns it to pulp.
- The sugar ratioFour ounces of sugar to the quart is roughly a generous half cup by volume to about 1 1/2 lb of chopped fruit. Taste before serving and adjust; supermarket peaches vary far more in sweetness than fruit picked at the same orchard.
- "Harder kinds"Most likely underripe or firm-fleshed fruit, though "kinds" may equally point to particular varieties. As a rule of thumb, firmer, early-season fruit benefits from the maceration; a fully ripe peach does not.
- PeelingThe recipe mentions peeling only in connection with the soft peaches. Thirty to sixty seconds in boiling water followed by ice water slips the skins off ripe fruit; firm fruit resists and is better pared with a knife.
- BrowningSugared peaches sitting for hours will darken at the surface. A little lemon juice slows it, and keeping the bowl covered and cold helps; stir once before serving to bring the paler fruit up.
- The creamCream here is unhomogenised pouring cream, thinner than modern heavy cream and not whipped. Use single or light cream, or thin heavy cream with a little milk, and serve it cold in a pitcher as directed.
- Why cream goes on lastCream poured over sugared fruit ahead of time thins and dulls in the juice, and can look grey. Pour only as each dish is served, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and serviceA quart of prepared fruit serves four to six in saucers. The large glass bowl with ordered quarters of red and yellow fruit suits a table where a bowl is passed with its own pitcher; the individual saucers are the alternative the recipe gives.
The American Pastry Cook came out of Jessup Whitehead's Chicago trade writing of the 1880s and 90s, addressed to hotel, restaurant and boarding-house cooks rather than housewives, which is why a dish as plain as cut peaches gets instructions on bowl-versus-saucer service and on garnishing with contrasting red and yellow quarters. Peaches and cream needed no recipe in the strict sense; what a hired cook needed was a rule for handling fruit of uneven ripeness arriving by the crate, hence the split between chopping and sugaring the hard fruit and merely quartering the soft. The digression that follows is Whitehead's habit throughout the book. The Atlantic Monthly series he half-remembers is generally taken to be Melusina Fay Peirce's articles on co-operative housekeeping, published there in 1868 and 1869, which proposed that groups of families pool their cooking, laundry and sewing; Whitehead, a hotel man, answers that the American hotel had already solved the problem, and prefers "individual freedom" to shared kitchens.