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Fresh Peach Coupes
Peel twelve medium, sound, fresh ripe peaches, cut off the stones in quarter-inch slices, place in a bowl with two tablespoons powdered sugar, tablespoon rum and one tablespoon maraschino; carefully turn in seasoning, then let stand on ice until required.
Prepare a pint only of vanilla ice cream. Divide the peaches in six champagne glasses, fill with the vanilla cream, neatly smooth surface, then place a maraschino cherry on top of each and serve.
A restaurant-style assembly rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on the fruit and on the timing of the final scoop. Read the sugar and the glassware notes before shopping.
- The hinge: macerate, then assemble at the last minuteThe recipe only says to let the fruit stand on ice "until required," so give the slices enough time cold for the sugar to draw out juice and the rum and maraschino to perfume them. The ice cream goes in only as the coupes leave the kitchen; sitting assembled, it melts into the syrup and the layers muddle.
- "Cut off the stones in quarter-inch slices"This means slicing the flesh away from the pit in quarter-inch pieces, not cutting the pit itself. Freestone peaches make this straightforward; clingstones are easier halved and then sliced off the stone with a paring knife.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this period powdered sugar usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's superfine, not cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Superfine dissolves cleanly in the fruit juice; ordinary granulated works if given a little longer.
- Maraschino, two waysThe tablespoon in the fruit is maraschino liqueur, a clear dry cherry spirit, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The garnish is a preserved cherry. If you have only the jarred kind, use a teaspoon of its syrup and cut the added sugar.
- "Turn in seasoning"An awkward phrase for folding the sugar and spirits gently through the slices. Peach flesh bruises quickly, so lift and turn with a spatula rather than stirring.
- "Let stand on ice"Before mechanical refrigeration this meant a bowl set in the icebox or nested in cracked ice. The refrigerator does the job; the recipe leaves the time open, but sliced peaches soften and discolour on standing, so don't hold them longer than you must.
- GlasswareThe shallow saucer-shaped coupe was one common period champagne glass, typically holding only a few ounces. Any wide stemmed glass or small bowl of similar capacity works, and a chilled glass buys you a few minutes.
- Yield and proportionsSix servings, with a pint of ice cream stretched across them, so figure about a third of a cup each against a generous portion of fruit. The recipe's "a pint only" reads as a deliberate restraint, with the peaches as the substance of the dish.
The coupe takes its name from the glass, the shallow stemmed coupe of French service, and by the turn of the twentieth century the word had come to mean the whole class of desserts built in one: fruit below, ice cream above, a garnish on top. Such desserts required no cooking and could be finished in seconds at the service counter, and a book surveying "the world's kitchen" gives the method in a single paragraph and assumes the ice cream is already made. The flavouring is characteristic of the era's fashionable pantry: maraschino, a dry cherry liqueur generally traced to the Dalmatian coast around Zara, was a standard finishing spirit for fruit, and the combination of peaches, vanilla ice cream and a cherry sits in the same family as the peach dishes made famous in London and Paris restaurant cookery in the 1890s.