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Baked Peaches
Peel, cut in halves, and remove stones from six peaches. Place in a shallow granite pan. Fill each cavity with one in a shallow granite pan. Fill each cavity with one teaspoon sugar, one -half teaspoon butter, few drops lemon juice, and a slight grating nutmeg. Cook twenty minutes, and serve on circular pieces of buttered dry toast.
A simple baked fruit dish from the era when a fruit course could be as plain as this. The original assumes you know your own oven, so a few numbers need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, and the recipe says only "cook" for twenty minutes. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Freestone peaches at full ripeness will be tender well before that; firm or slightly underripe fruit may want closer to thirty minutes.
- Granite pan"Granite" here means graniteware, the speckled enamel-on-steel bakeware of the period, chosen because it does not react with fruit acid. Any glass, ceramic or enamelled dish does the same job; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which will dull the colour and flavour.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skins off ripe freestones. Clingstones fight back at the pit and are better left for another use.
- Filling the cavitiesA teaspoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of butter per half is roughly 12 halves' worth of 2 tablespoons butter and a quarter cup sugar. Set the halves cut side up and close together so the syrup that forms does not spread out and scorch.
- Nutmeg"A slight grating" means exactly that -- a stroke or two of whole nutmeg over each half. Pre-ground nutmeg is far blunter and stales quickly; a whole nut grated to order is the difference the recipe is counting on.
- The toastDry toast means toast made without butter first, then buttered, cut into rounds with a biscuit cutter to match the fruit. It is there to absorb the syrup, so toast it firmly enough that it does not collapse.
- YieldSix peaches give twelve halves, enough for six as a dessert or breakfast dish. Serve warm, spooning any pan syrup over the fruit.
Baked peaches sit at the mild end of the fruit repertoire -- barely a recipe by modern standards. The toast base is worth noting: cooked fruit served on a round of buttered toast turns up in cookery of the nineteenth century, though how general the habit was, and what it descends from, is not something this recipe can tell us. Peaches were a plentiful summer fruit in New England markets, and a cookbook written for a cooking school had reason to show a plain way of serving them.