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Peach Meringue
Peel some ripe peaches and stew them. When nearly done, mix some sugar and a teaspoonful of butter with them. Butter a deep pie-dish, line it with short paste and bake. Remove the crust from the oven, put the stewed fruit in it, cover with the whites of three eggs beaten to a stiff froth and sweetened with three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, and put it back in the oven to brown lightly. Serve either hot or cold.
A shallow peach pie with a soft meringue lid. The original assumes you know how to blind-bake a crust and gives no quantities at all, so the numbers below are the useful part.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch deep dish, figure about 2 lb of peaches (6 to 8 medium), 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar depending on their sweetness, and the teaspoon of butter as written. Serves six to eight.
- "Powdered sugar"In a book of this period this generally means finely ground granulated sugar, close to what is now sold as caster or superfine, rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in the modern bag; the terminology of the day was not wholly consistent. Superfine dissolves into the whites cleanly; confectioners' sugar will work but gives a softer, slightly starchy meringue.
- Short paste, blind-bakedLine the dish, dock the base, weight it with parchment and beans, and bake at 400°F for about 20 minutes, then 10 minutes more with the weights out until the base is dry and coloured. The filling goes in cooked and wet, so an underbaked shell will never recover.
- Stewing the fruitRipe peaches need only 8 to 10 minutes in a covered pan with a splash of water; the sugar and butter go in at the end, as written, so the fruit holds its shape. Drain off excess syrup before it goes into the shell or the crust will slump.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skins off ripe peaches. Underripe fruit will not peel this way and is not worth using here.
- Browning the meringueThree whites and 3 tablespoons of sugar is a lean, old-style meringue that browns fast. Spread it so it seals to the crust edge all round, then 10 to 12 minutes at 350°F, or 4 to 5 minutes at 425°F if you want a darker top and a barely set interior.
- Hot or coldOscar's option holds, but the meringue weeps once refrigerated. If serving cold, let it cool at room temperature and eat it the same day.
Meringue-topped fruit pies were common in American hotel and household cookery of the period, and a kitchen working through large numbers of eggs for custards and sauces would have whites left to use up; a stiff sweetened froth browned in the oven was one answer, as it was for the various "queen of puddings." Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is largely a working reference of that sort — terse, quantity-free notes written for cooks who already knew the method — and this entry reads as one of them. Peaches suited the pattern: commercial peach growing on the Eastern seaboard was substantial in the late nineteenth century, with fruit moving north by rail, and hotel menus put peaches into ices, compotes and pastry through the summer.