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Sliced Peaches and Cream
Carefully peel twelve medium, sound, ripe peaches, then cut them from the stone into quarter-inch pieces, place on a compotier, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve with thick cream and fine sugar separately.
A dish that lives or dies on the fruit, so the only real technique here is peeling and timing. A few of the terms have shifted meaning since 1906.
- Powdered sugar, then and nowIn this period "powdered" and "fine" sugar generally meant finely milled granulated sugar rather than the modern confectioners' grade; caster or superfine is the closest common equivalent. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will turn cloudy and pasty on wet fruit.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit, roughly what would now be called a comport or a shallow pedestal bowl. Any wide serving bowl works; the point is a broad surface so the slices sit in a single layer rather than crushing each other.
- PeelingFreestone peaches at full ripeness will often skin with a paring knife alone. If they resist, drop them in boiling water for 30 to 45 seconds and into ice water, and the skins slip. Firm clingstones are the wrong fruit for this dish.
- Thick creamHeavy cream, unwhipped, or clotted cream if you have it. Avoid ultra-pasteurised light cream, which tastes flat against sweet fruit.
- Serve at onceCut peaches discolour quickly. Slice them immediately before the dish goes to table, and let the sugar draw juice for only a few minutes — longer and the fruit slumps.
- Sugar separatelyThe sprinkle on the fruit is meant to be light; the bowls of cream and sugar at table let each diner adjust. Under-sugar the fruit rather than over-sugar it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number served; twelve peaches would stretch to roughly six, or more as part of a longer menu.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades as a manager and chef in the Delmonico's organisation in New York, and his books mix elaborate restaurant cookery with plain instructions like this one. The presence of a recipe amounting to "peel good peaches, sugar them lightly, pass the cream" reflects the kitchen logic of the era's great dining rooms: seasonal fruit at its peak was treated as a finished dish, not a base for construction, and the cook's contribution was selection and knife work. Peaches were then a strictly summer luxury in the northeast, and their brief season is part of why a book otherwise full of sauces and garnitures stops to explain how to cut one.