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Peach Custard
Make a paste with one pound of sifted flour, two eggs, two ounces of butter and a very little salt. Butter the inside of a tin mould, line it with the paste and bake. Boil the peaches in syrup, remove the paste from the mould when done and put the peaches in. Boil the syrup till reduced, then pour it over the peaches, and serve.
A short, telegraphic Waldorf recipe that assumes a professional pastry cook standing at the bench. The gaps are worth filling in before you start.
- There is no custardDespite the title, nothing here is thickened with eggs and milk. This is a blind-baked pastry shell filled with poached peaches and a reduced syrup glaze — closer to a French tarte aux pêches. If you want custard under the fruit, that is your addition, not Oscar's.
- The paste needs liquidOne pound of flour (about 3 1/2 cups), two eggs and two ounces of butter will not come together as written; two eggs weigh only about 100 g out of the shell, and most but not all of that is water, against 450 g of flour. Expect to add 4-6 tablespoons of ice water to get a rollable dough. The low fat ratio makes this a sturdy lining paste, not a flaky short crust.
- Scale it downA pound of flour is enough paste for two or three 9-inch shells. Halve or quarter the quantities unless you are feeding a hotel dining room; the surplus freezes well.
- Blind baking"Line it with the paste and bake" means bake the empty shell. Line the pastry with parchment and weights or dried beans, bake at 400F for about 15 minutes, remove the weights and give it another 10-12 minutes until the base is dry and pale gold.
- Poaching the peachesUse a light syrup — roughly 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water — and keep it at a bare simmer. Halved, peeled freestone peaches take 5 to 10 minutes depending on ripeness; boiled hard, as the original says, they collapse into fibre. A vanilla bean or a strip of lemon peel in the syrup is period-appropriate.
- Reducing the syrupThis is the step that makes the dish. Reduce the poaching liquid until it coats a spoon and just begins to thread, then let it cool slightly before pouring so it glazes the fruit rather than soaking the pastry. Reduced too far it will set hard as it cools.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice will slip the skins off ripe peaches. Oscar's kitchen took this for granted.
- Assembly and servingFill and glaze as close to service as possible; a blind-baked lean paste goes soft within an hour under wet fruit. One 9-inch tart serves six to eight, and it wants unsweetened whipped cream alongside.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book ran to nearly 900 pages and was written largely as a professional reference — hence entries like this one, which give a competent pastry cook a sequence rather than a set of instructions. The dish itself belongs to the classical French repertoire that dominated American hotel dining at the end of the nineteenth century, where fruit poached in syrup and set in a baked shell appeared under a long list of names. Peaches were a natural choice for the Waldorf: by the 1890s New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland orchards were shipping them into New York by rail in enormous quantity through late summer, and a hotel kitchen could count on good fruit through the late-summer season and into autumn.