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Stuffed Peaches
Pare large peaches and cut a slice from the top of each. Remove the pits without breaking the fruit and fill hollows with any . chopped fruit, such as apples, citron, raisins, or with nuts Sprinkle with sugar and a little cinnamon or nutmeg. Pour custard over the peaches and bake; or serve cold soft custard with the chilled fruit.
A loose formula rather than a fixed recipe, and it assumes the cook already knows how to make a soft custard. A few points of translation.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A custard-covered dish of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, until the custard is just set and barely trembling at the centre, roughly 30-40 minutes depending on the depth of the dish.
- Water bathBaked custard sets more evenly in a bain-marie. Stand the dish in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up the sides; the custard curdles and weeps if it goes much above 180F.
- PeachesFreestone varieties give up their pits cleanly through the cut top; clingstones will not. Pick fruit that is ripe but still firm, since soft peaches collapse in the oven.
- PeelingTo pare cleanly, dip the peaches in boiling water for 30 seconds and then into ice water; the skins of ripe fruit will usually slip off without cutting away flesh, though firmer peaches may still need the knife.
- CitronHere this means candied citron peel, the same stuff used in fruitcake, not the citrus juice or the citron melon. It is sold in the baking aisle around the holidays; candied orange peel is a fair substitute.
- Soft custardThe cold version is a stirred custard, not a baked one: about 2 cups milk, 4 egg yolks, 1/4 cup sugar, cooked over low heat until it coats a spoon, then chilled. It must not boil or it will scramble.
- Quantities and yieldReckon one large peach per person and about 1/2 cup of custard each. Six peaches will need roughly 3 cups of custard to cover them in a baking dish.
Butterick's household books were sold alongside dress patterns to a middle-class readership expected to be resourceful, which may help account for the shape of this entry: a technique with a list of options rather than a fixed set of amounts. Baked and boiled custards were a common foundation for American fruit desserts through the nineteenth century, cheap in eggs and milk and forgiving of whatever fruit the season offered. Stuffed and stewed peaches appear in cookbooks throughout the period, when the fruit was abundant and briefly available and cooks were looking for ways beyond pie and preserves to use it. The recipe closes by leaving the cook a choice: hot with baked custard, or chilled with a soft one.