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Peach Shortcake
Peel twelve medium, ripe, sweet, fresh peaches. Cut off from the stones in quarter-inch slices, place in a bowl, add a tablespoon powdered sugar and two tablespoons maraschino. Mix well together, then proceed to make exactly the same as strawberry shortcake.
A cross-reference recipe: the peaches are the whole of it, and the shortcake itself is borrowed from the strawberry version elsewhere in the book. Two words need translating before anything else.
- Maraschino means the liqueurIn a book of this date, maraschino is the clear cherry liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries — Luxardo is the surviving benchmark. It is not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries, which would make the fruit cloying.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar usually means finely granulated or caster sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either dissolves here, but caster gives a cleaner syrup.
- QuantityTwelve medium peaches is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb, yielding about 6 cups sliced — a generous amount of fruit for one shortcake.
- PeelingScore an X in the base and drop the peaches into boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. The instruction to cut the flesh off the stones in quarter-inch slices works with either freestone or clingstone fruit.
- Sugar is deliberately lightOne tablespoon for three pounds of fruit assumes peaches at full ripeness. Taste after mixing and add more only if the fruit is flat; the point of the maceration is to draw out juice, not to build a syrup.
- Let it standThe recipe implies but does not state a rest. Thirty to sixty minutes at room temperature gives the sliced fruit time to weep the juice that soaks the split cake, which is the entire mechanism of a shortcake.
- The shortcake itselfAmerican shortcake of this period is generally a rich sweetened biscuit dough, baked in a round and split rather than a sponge cake; follow the book's own strawberry shortcake recipe for the dough, oven and timing, and assemble while still warm.
- Peaches darkenUnlike strawberries, cut peaches oxidize. Assemble within a couple of hours, or add a squeeze of lemon, which the original does not call for but which costs nothing in flavor.
Shortcake — a sweetened biscuit rather than a cake in the modern sense — was firmly established in American cookery by the middle of the nineteenth century, and the strawberry version was common enough by the 1900s that a book like this could simply say "proceed exactly the same" and expect to be understood. What makes the peach variant here distinctly a restaurant recipe is the maraschino: a liqueur made from Marasca cherries around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, long a fixture of the fine-dining pantry for macerating fruit and perfuming ices. Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, was writing for a readership that already knew the homely form of the dish and would recognize the spoonful of imported liqueur as the thing that lifted it. Peaches in this quantity also mark the recipe as seasonal in a way that is easy to miss now — twelve ripe ones meant high summer and a local orchard, not a year-round shelf.