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Peach Pie (Line a pie-tin with puff-paste)
Line a pie-tin with puff-paste, fill with pared peaches in halves or quarters, well covered with sugar; put on upper crust and bake; or make as above without upper crust, bake until done, remove from the oven, and cover with a meringue made of the whites of two eggs, beaten to a stiff froth with two table-spoons powdered sugar; return to oven and brown slightly. Canned peaches may be used instead of fresh, in the same way.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in nineteenth-century pastry chapters: it assumes you already know your crust, your oven and your fruit. The gaps worth filling are sugar, thickener and temperature.
- Puff-pasteIn this period "puff-paste" meant a rich rolled-and-folded butter pastry, not the frozen sheet dough sold today. A standard all-butter pie crust behaves better under wet fruit; if you use commercial puff pastry, expect the bottom to stay soft.
- How much sugar"Well covered with sugar" is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup for about 2 lb of peaches, adjusted to ripeness. Very ripe late-summer fruit needs less; hard early fruit needs the upper end.
- No thickener is givenPeaches throw a great deal of juice and this filling will be loose. Two to three tablespoons of flour, or two of cornstarch, tossed with the fruit and sugar gives a sliceable pie without changing its character.
- OvenBake a double-crust pie at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set the bottom, then 375F for another 35-45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents. The book gives no temperature at all; these figures are a modern reconstruction.
- Peeling"Pared" means peeled. Thirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water slips the skins off ripe peaches; firmer or less ripe fruit is easier pared with a knife.
- The meringue versionTwo egg whites and two tablespoons of sugar is a thin meringue by modern standards; expect a light glaze rather than a tall cap. Spread it while the pie is still hot and seal it to the crust edge all round, then return it to a moderate oven and watch it closely -- the recipe asks only that it "brown slightly", which is a short bake and may leave the whites barely set.
- Canned peachesDrain them well and cut the sugar back, since canned fruit is generally packed in syrup or sweetened juice. Canned fruit is already soft, so the filling needs only long enough for the crust to colour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no tin size; in a 9-inch tin, six to eight servings. Cool thoroughly before cutting or the filling will run.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed household receipts, and its pastry chapter reads accordingly: short, telegraphic entries that assume a cook who has made pie since childhood. Two options are offered here: a covered fruit pie or an open one finished with meringue. The nod to canned peaches is the more telling detail. Commercial canning expanded rapidly in the decades after the Civil War, and Georgia's peach industry grew alongside the railroads that could carry the fruit.