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Peach Custard
Arrange alternate layers of stale cake and sections of canned peaches in glass dish and pour over Boiled Custard. Bananas may be used instead of peaches; it is then called Banana Custard.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have the book's Boiled Custard and a stale cake on hand. Nearly all of the work — and all of the risk — sits in the custard.
- "Boiled Custard" is not boiledThe name is a period misnomer for a stirred egg custard cooked in a double boiler. Take it to 170-180F, until it coats the back of a spoon; at a true boil the eggs curdle and the sauce turns grainy. Strain it as insurance and cool it before it touches the cake.
- A workable custard ratioRoughly 2 cups scalded milk, 3-4 egg yolks (or 2 whole eggs), 1/4 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, with vanilla stirred in off the heat; the book's own Boiled Custard may use different proportions. That amount sauces one medium dish.
- Stale cake means dry, not spoiledDay-old sponge, pound cake or plain butter cake, cut about half an inch thick. Fresh cake goes to paste under custard. If your cake is soft, cut it and leave it uncovered on a rack for a few hours or dry it briefly in a 300F oven.
- Canned peaches'sections' most likely means the halves or slices as they come from the can. Drain them well and blot; the packing syrup thins the custard and makes the bottom layer soupy. A 15-oz can yields roughly a cup and a half of drained slices.
- Assembly and chillingCake, then fruit, then custard, repeating and finishing with custard so the top layer is sealed. Cover and chill at least three hours — the point of the dish is that the cake absorbs the custard and loses its edges.
- The banana versionBananas brown in air and go slack in custard within a day. Slice them straight into the dish, keep them fully covered by custard, and serve the same day.
- YieldA quart-and-a-half glass dish serves six. The original gives no quantities at all, so scale by the size of your bowl rather than by measurement.
This looks, plausibly enough, like trifle with the drink taken out and the name filed off. English trifle soaked sponge in sherry or brandy before the custard went on; American cookbooks of the temperance-minded late nineteenth century sometimes printed a similar construction with the wine omitted and a plainer title. The recipe's real subject is thrift — stale cake and a can of peaches, both of which a late-nineteenth-century household would have had without a trip to the shops. Commercially canned fruit was by then cheap and reliable enough to be treated as a pantry staple rather than a compromise, which is itself a marker of how quickly canning had changed home cooking. The interchangeable banana is a similar sign: by the turn of the century steamship imports had made bananas an everyday fruit in Eastern cities rather than a novelty.