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Frosted Peaches
Take two dozen ripe peaches and rub the fur off with a soft cloth. Beat the whites of six eggs and one teacupful of water to a stiff froth, and dip the peaches into it one at a time, rolling each one immediately in powdered white sugar, then lay them stem end downwards, on white paper, on a tray; place it in a window well exposed to the sun; when half dry, roll them again in sugar and place in the sun till quite dry; then keep in a cool place till wanted for use. Arrange them in a glass dish, and garnish with green leaves.
This is a Victorian sugar-frosting method for whole fruit, and the technique it depends on — raw egg white left to dry in ambient warmth, then stored and eaten uncooked — is the reason it cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe coating is beaten egg white thinned with water, dried by sun and air. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and the finished peaches are eaten as they are. A current recipe using pasteurized egg white or meringue powder should be used instead.
- Hours at warm temperaturesEgg white cut with a teacupful of water is a dilute, wet wash, and it sits in a sunny window until "quite dry" — potentially most of a day at unknown but warm temperatures. Sun-drying is not a kill step.
- Then stored, not chilled"Keep in a cool place till wanted for use" meant a larder or cellar, not refrigeration. Coated whole fruit held that way for days is a risk on the egg film and on the peach skin beneath it.
- "Rub the fur off"The fur is the peach fuzz, which the frosting will not adhere to evenly.
- An ambiguous measureA teacupful in this period was variously reckoned, roughly four to six fluid ounces, and was never a fixed unit; here it is a large amount of water for six whites — enough to make a thin wash rather than a meringue.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1896 this normally meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which is cut with cornstarch. The two behave differently in a double coating.
- YieldTwo dozen peaches is a large quantity, and the recipe directs that they be arranged in a glass dish and garnished with green leaves.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and the compiler whose name sold the book, worked in an era when dessert was expected to look like decoration. Frosted or "sugared" fruit — grapes, currants, cherries, plums, whole peaches — appears throughout nineteenth-century American and English household books as a way to finish a table cheaply and impressively, the egg-and-sugar shell giving fruit a rimed, jewel-like surface. The instruction to arrange the peaches in a glass dish and garnish with green leaves is the real point of the recipe: this is a piece of table architecture, sitting in the Waldorf book beside the elaborate garnishes and molded showpieces that defined American fine dining in the 1890s.