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Compote of Peaches with Cream
Peel twelve good-sized, fresh, ripe peaches and cut them off the stones in third-of-an-inch slices. Place in a bowl with an ounce powdered sugar and two tablespoons maraschino. Mix well. Beat up one and a half gills thick cream for five minutes, adding two ounces sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence, beat for a minute longer and add to peaches. Transfer to a compotier, arrange six champagne waffles around the compotiers and serve.
A straightforward macerated fruit dessert whose only real obstacles are its measurements and two ingredients that mean something different now.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup. The sugar is weighed, not measured: one ounce of powdered sugar is about 1/4 cup, and two ounces for the cream is roughly 1/2 cup powdered or 1/4 cup granulated.
- Maraschino means the liqueurTwo tablespoons of maraschino here is the clear cherry-kernel liqueur (Luxardo and similar), not the syrup from a jar of neon cherries. The modern cocktail cherry syrup is sweeter and will throw the balance off.
- Peeling the peachesScore an X in the base and dip in boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. Freestone peaches at full ripeness make the third-of-an-inch slices painless.
- Beating the creamFive minutes assumes a hand whisk and a cold bowl. With a mixer, 2-3 minutes gets you to soft peaks, which is what you want here uit juices will loosen it. Stop while it still folds; overbeaten cream turns grainy against the syrup the peaches throw off.
- Macerating timeThe peaches only steep for as long as it takes to whip the cream. Giving them twenty to thirty minutes with the sugar and maraschino before the cream goes in yields a better syrup and a less watery result.
- Compotier and champagne wafflesA compotier is a footed glass or porcelain serving bowl; any wide, shallow bowl serves. "Champagne waffles" appear to be thin crisp wafer biscuits — gaufrettes or rolled cigarette wafers — for which modern dessert wafer rolls or Italian pizzelle can stand in.
- YieldTwelve peaches and six wafers point to six servings. Assemble at the table; the cream slackens within half an hour.
The International Cook Book is Alexander Filippini's, and Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, which shows in a dessert like this one: fresh fruit, sweetened cream, a spoonful of imported liqueur and a fan of wafers, plated in a footed compotier rather than cooked into anything. The word compote covers a range in period books, from fruit stewed in syrup to raw fruit simply steeped in sugar as here. Maraschino is distilled from Marasca cherries, stones and all, and was made most famously at Zadar on the Dalmatian coast; through the nineteenth century it was a standard flourish in restaurant fruit service. The champagne wafer belongs to the same world — a thin crisp biscuit served with sparkling wine and iced desserts.