Peach Crusts
Roll puff or plain paste one-eighth inch thick, cut in two and one-half inch squares, and bake in hot oven. Cool, press down the centres, and arrange on each one-half a canned peach drained from syrup and heated in oven.
Sprinkle with powdered sugar and put brandy in each cavity. Light just before sending to table.
A late-Victorian flaming dessert built on pastry squares rather than a crust in the pie-dish sense. Almost all the work is in the pastry and the timing of the flame.
- Hot ovenPeriod cookbooks give no thermometer readings; a 'hot oven' is conventionally taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Puff paste rolled an eighth of an inch thick and cut into 2.5-inch squares should be risen and browned in roughly 12-15 minutes; watch it, since thin pastry goes from pale to scorched quickly.
- Puff or plain pastePlain paste is simply short pie crust; puff paste is laminated dough. All-butter frozen puff pastry substitutes directly, rolled a little thinner than it comes.
- Pressing the centresDo it while the squares are barely warm, not fully cold as written, or brittle puff will shatter. Press with the back of a spoon to make a shallow well that will hold the peach and the spirit.
- Canned peachesHalves in syrup, well drained and blotted, then warmed in the oven for a few minutes. Any wet surface will dilute the brandy and make lighting unreliable. Fresh poached halves work but must be drained just as thoroughly.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage a grade of sugar finer than granulated but coarser than modern confectioners'; either will serve here. Keep it off the pastry edges, where it will scorch and smoke.
- The brandy and the flameWarm the brandy first; cold spirit ignites far less readily. Use a teaspoon or so per cavity, light it away from the bottle and any cloth, and carry the dish to the table with the flame going. Do not pour from the bottle over a lit dish.
- Yield and servingReckon one or two crusts per person and assemble at the last moment. Standing time turns crisp pastry soft under the fruit.
Blazing brandy over fruit was a finishing flourish sometimes used in the dining rooms of the period, and it may explain the odd final line, "Light just before sending to table" -- the dish was meant to arrive from the kitchen already alight, a piece of theatre for a course that was otherwise cold pastry and tinned fruit. The recipe also suggests how far canned peaches had entered respectable American cooking by the turn of the century: they are called for without apology, as a reliable year-round ingredient. "Crust" here seems to mean only a small baked square of paste, an older and looser use of the word than the single bottom crust we now assume when we hear it.