No. 3082

Meringued Peaches

Peches Meringuees

Cook half a pound of rice in milk, proceeding the same as for rice with apples (No. 3115); finish with cream and butter. Cut six peaches in four, remove the kernels and plunge them into boiling water until the skins peel off, then drain on a cloth and cut them up into small quarters; besprinkle over with sugar. With the cooked rice form with a spoon any style of border, leaving a hollow in the center; inside of this dress the quartered peaches in layers, brushing them over with apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and alternating with thin layers of the rice; the whole to be covered with the rice and this with a layer of meringue (No. 140); smooth the surface, decorate with meringue, dredge with fine sugar and dry in a very slow oven for twenty minutes.

← No. 3081 Conde Peaches Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3083 Richelieu Peaches →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A rice-pudding entremet from Delmonico's, written for cooks who had the rest of the book at hand — three of its steps are cross-references. Here is what those numbers stand for and where the dish can go wrong.

The rice, and the missing milkHalf a pound of rice is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of short-grain rice; Ranhofer gives no milk quantity because he sends you to his apple-rice recipe. Cook it slowly in roughly four times its volume of sweetened milk until the grains are soft and the mass thick enough to hold a piped shape, then enrich off the heat with cream and a lump of butter. It must be stiff, not pourable, or the border will slump.
Apricot marmaladeIn this book that means a smooth, strained, reduced apricot preserve used as a glaze, not a chunky citrus-style marmalade. Warmed apricot jam pushed through a sieve does the same job.
Meringue No. 140Ranhofer's meringue is whipped whites with fine sugar beaten in; the usual nineteenth-century proportion is about two ounces (a scant third of a cup) of sugar per white, though this page does not reproduce the figures of No. 140. On the order of four whites should cover and decorate a dish of this size.
"A very slow oven"250-275F. The point is to dry and lightly colour the meringue, not to bake the pudding, which is already cooked. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the surface; if you want the interior of the meringue fully set, allow longer rather than raising the temperature.
Peeling the peachesCut and stone them first, as written, then a 30-60 second dip in boiling water and a plunge into cold will lift the skins. Freestone peaches at full ripeness make this trivial; underripe fruit will not release and is better peeled with a knife.
"Besprinkle over with sugar"A light dusting only, a tablespoon or two over six peaches. The rice is already sweetened and the apricot glaze more so.
AssemblyPipe or spoon the rice into a ring on a buttered ovenproof dish while it is still warm and workable; it stiffens as it cools and will crack if you shape it cold.
YieldSix peaches and the rice from half a pound of dry grain serves six to eight as a dessert course.

A Little History

This is No. 3082 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the encyclopaedic record of thirty-odd years cooking at Delmonico's in New York. It sits in a run of peach entremets — Condé before it, Richelieu after. This one follows a familiar French pastry logic: a sweetened rice or semolina base, fruit, an apricot glaze, and a finish that goes briefly into the oven. Riz Condé and its relatives were standard nineteenth-century restaurant desserts, and the fruit varied with the season. The layered meringue crown here is the sort of flourish that justified the price of a Delmonico's dinner, and the cross-references to numbers 3115, 3675 and 140 show how the book was meant to be used: as a professional kitchen's system rather than a set of standalone recipes.