Baked Peaches
Wash peaches which are nearly or quite ripe, place in a deep dish, sprinkle with sugar, cover and bake until tender.
The instruction is barely three lines long, which means every practical decision is left to the cook. The essentials are a moderate oven, a covered dish, and enough sugar to draw juice without swamping the fruit.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no heat and no time, only "bake until tender." A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern default; expect roughly 25 to 35 minutes for halved freestone peaches and longer, perhaps 40 to 50 minutes, for whole fruit with the stone in. Judge by tenderness rather than the clock.
- Sugar quantityFigure on 1 to 2 tablespoons per peach, less if the fruit is fully ripe. The sugar's job is to pull juice out of the fruit so it poaches in its own syrup rather than drying out.
- The covered dish is the pointCovering traps steam and keeps the peaches from wrinkling and browning at the edges. A lid, or foil crimped tight, does the same work as the period's covered baking dish.
- Whole or halvedThe recipe says only to wash the peaches, which implies they go in whole and unpeeled. Halving and pitting first is faster and gives you a hollow that fills with syrup; the skins slip off easily once baked either way.
- Choose the fruit carefully"Nearly or quite ripe" is the operative phrase. Underripe supermarket peaches stay mealy and sour no matter how long they bake, and a peach that is already soft to the thumb will collapse into sauce.
- A little liquid helpsIf the fruit is not especially juicy, a few tablespoons of water or wine in the bottom of the dish prevents scorching before the juices run.
- Yield and servingCount two halves per person. Serve warm or cold with cream, and spoon the syrup from the dish over the top.
Baked fruit of this kind belongs to the home orchard economy, when a household with peach trees could face more fruit than it could eat fresh or put up in a week, and the plainest treatments — baked, stewed, or sprinkled with sugar and left to stand — were well suited to the ripest specimens. Peaches were long established in the American South by the nineteenth century, having spread from early Spanish and colonial plantings so widely that travellers described them as growing half-wild. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre: an experienced cook needed only to be reminded of the method, not instructed in it.