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Peach Pie
Peal the peaches, cut them in slices and put them in a preserving-pan; crack the stones and put in the peeled kernels, using for every pound of peaches four ounces crushed loaf-sugar and one cupful of water. Cover and let them cook slowly. Mash the peaches in a colander, line some buttered shallow tins with pie-crust, fill them with the peaches, and bake. Serve either hot or cold.
The pie itself is ordinary; the instruction to crack the stones and cook the kernels with the fruit is not. That single step puts this version out of reach.
- The kernels are the problemPeach stones enclose a seed that contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed, chewed or wetted. It is the same compound that makes bitter almonds dangerous, and peach kernels carry it in broadly comparable amounts.
- The quantity is the differencePeriod recipes that use kernels commonly call for only one or two as a flavouring, the way a modern baker uses a drop of almond extract. This recipe calls for the kernels of every stone in the batch, so a pie made from three or four pounds of fruit could carry a dozen or more kernels into a single dish.
- Cooking is not a reliable fixSimmering does drive off some hydrogen cyanide, but the loss depends on time, temperature, how finely the seed is broken and whether the pan is covered. This recipe covers the pan. There is no way to judge from the page how much remains.
- Children and small portionsDose matters by body weight, and pie is exactly the sort of thing served to children in generous slices. That is the reason this cannot be treated as a curiosity to be tried once.
- No temperature or time is given at all"and bake" is the whole instruction. Even setting the kernels aside, the page gives a modern reader nothing to work from for the crust or the filling.
- If you want this pieUse a current peach pie recipe. Almond extract or a little amaretto gives the faint marzipan note the kernels were there to supply.
- Reading the rest of the pageA preserving-pan is simply a wide, heavy, uncoated pan for fruit and sugar work. Crushed loaf sugar is broken from a hard refined sugarloaf and is equivalent to ordinary granulated sugar by weight; four ounces to the pound of fruit is a fairly restrained sweetening.
Peach kernels were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century confectionery and preserving, valued for the bitter-almond note that comes from the same chemistry that makes them hazardous. French kitchens turned them into noyau, steeping the kernels in spirit, English cookbooks steeped them in custards and ratafia creams, and American preservers dropped a cracked stone or two into jars of peaches, so a Waldorf cook writing around 1896 would have thought the direction unremarkable rather than daring. Toxicity was understood in a general way -- bitter almond warnings appear in period household manuals -- but cooks were not measuring amygdalin content, and the line between flavouring and poison was drawn by habit rather than by number. Oscar Tschirky's book is full of this kind of shorthand: no oven temperature, no yield, no bake time.