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Peach Meringue
Put on to boil a quart of milk, omitting half a cup with which to moisten two table-spoons of corn starch; when the milk boils, add the moistened corn starch: stir constantly till thick, then remove from the fire; add one table-spoon butter, and allow the mixture to cool; then beat in the yolks of three eggs till the mixture seems light and creamy; add half a cup of powdered sugar. Cover the bottom of a well-buttered baking-dish with two or three layers of rich, juicy peaches, pared, halved and stoned; sprinkle over three table-spoons powdered sugar; pour over them the custard carefully, and bake twenty minutes, then spread with the lightbeaten whites, well sweetened, and return to the oven till a light brown. To be eaten warm with a rich sauce, or cold with sweetened cream.
A baked custard-and-fruit pudding of the sort that filled the fruit chapters of late nineteenth-century compilations. The instructions are sound; only the sugar, the oven and the dish size need translating.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this period powdered sugar meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no cornstarch or anti-caking agent in it. Use superfine (caster) sugar, or pulse granulated sugar briefly in a grinder. Modern confectioners' sugar will make the meringue softer and slightly starchy.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent: twenty minutes at that heat should set the custard around the fruit, and the meringue then needs roughly 10 to 15 minutes more to colour lightly.
- Cool the base before the yolks go inThis is the hinge. The cornstarch mixture must be genuinely lukewarm, not merely off the heat, or the yolks will set into threads and the custard will be grainy. If in doubt, whisk a ladle of the warm base into the yolks first, then return it.
- Quantities and dishA quart of milk thickened with only two tablespoons of cornstarch gives a pourable custard, not a pudding — that is intended, since the eggs and the oven finish the setting. Use a buttered 2- to 2.5-quart baking dish; anything shallower will overflow once the meringue goes on.
- PeachesFreestone peaches are the easiest to pare, halve and stone as directed, and ripe fruit answers the recipe's 'rich, juicy.' Two to three layers is roughly 6 to 8 medium peaches. Canned halves work if drained well and patted dry, but reduce the three tablespoons of sugar sprinkled over them.
- The meringueThree whites take about 6 tablespoons of sugar, beaten in gradually to soft, glossy peaks. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all the way round; meringue anchored to the edge shrinks and weeps far less as it cools.
- Yield and servingServes roughly six to eight. The 'rich sauce' of the original was probably something like a hard sauce or a thin custard sauce; the recipe itself offers warm-with-sauce and cold-with-sweetened-cream as equal alternatives.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the family of large American household compilations that grew out of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, reissued in the 1880s with Southern dishes and Southern contributors grafted on. A peach recipe earns its place easily: Georgia and the Carolinas were building a rail-borne peach trade to Northern markets in the decades after the Civil War, and the fruit chapters of Southern-marketed books lean hard on them. The dish itself is a standard Victorian construction — a starch-thickened boiled custard poured over fruit, baked, then crowned with sweetened whites — the same template that produced queen of puddings and countless "meringue" desserts made with apples, rhubarb or stale cake. Cornstarch rather than flour suggests post-1850s cooking, by which time commercially milled corn starch was widely available as a pantry staple.