Home › The World's Kitchen › Peaches and Cream
Peaches and Cream
Open a pint can fine peaches. Place them on a compotier dish, either as they are or sliced, keeping the liquor. Serve with cream and powdered sugar separately.
An assembly rather than a recipe, but the period vocabulary hides two or three decisions worth making deliberately.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit and compotes, usually shallow and stemmed. Any low pedestal bowl or a wide glass dish will do; the point is that the fruit sits above the table and is seen.
- A pint canA pint of contents, syrup included, so rather less than 2 cups once drained; roughly four to six halves. Modern cans are commonly sold at about 15 oz net weight, in the same general range, and one can will stretch to two or three servings.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period the term generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to what is now sold as caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and can taste chalky sprinkled over wet fruit; use superfine, or pulse granulated in a grinder.
- The creamPouring cream, unwhipped and cold, passed at the table. Heavy cream may be thicker than wanted here; light cream or half-and-half pours more freely.
- Keeping the liquorThe canning syrup is the whole seasoning here. Spoon a little over the fruit so it does not dry at the surface, but do not flood the dish or the cream will thin out and separate on the plate.
- TemperatureChilling the can unopened and the cream separately suits the dish; fruit at room temperature under cold cream reads flat.
- YieldTwo to three portions from one can. Serving sugar and cream separately, as directed, lets each person take what they want and keeps the fruit from going slack in a sweetened pool.
Canned peaches were a luxury of convenience when this book was compiled: commercial fruit canning expanded rapidly through the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and California packers in particular helped make good peaches available outside their season in city households. That is why a dessert with no cooking in it at all could be printed as a recipe -- the work had been done in the cannery, and the kitchen's contribution was presentation: the right dish, the fruit sliced or left whole, sugar and cream passed rather than mixed in.