Home › Pastry and Sweets › Stuffed Peaches
Stuffed Peaches
(Pesche ripiene) Six big peaches not very ripe.
Four or five lady-finger biscuits.
Granulated sugar, three ounces.
Two ounces sweet almonds with three peach kernels.
Candied fruit (angelica) half an ounce.
Cut the peaches in two parts, remove the stones and enlarge somewhat the cavity where they were with the point of a knife. Mix the peach pulp that you extract with the almonds, already skinned, and grind the pulp and almonds very fine together with two ounces of the sugar.
To this mixture add the lady-fingers crumbed and the candied fruits. Cut in very small cubes.
This will be the stuffing with which you will fill the cavities of the twelve halves of peach. These you will place in a row in a baking tin, with the stuffing above. Add the remaining ounce of sugar and bake in oven with a moderate fire. 207
A straightforward Artusi-style baked dessert whose only real puzzles are the weight-based measures and the ingredients that no longer sit on a supermarket shelf. The number 207 at the end is the recipe's index number in the original Italian source, not a temperature or a page.
- Oven temperature"A moderate fire" is usually read as somewhere around 350F. Bake until the stuffing is set and lightly browned and the peach halves yield to a knife tip, roughly 30 to 40 minutes depending on how firm the fruit was.
- Lady-finger biscuitsThese are savoiardi, the dry, crisp Italian sponge fingers, not the soft cakes sold for icebox desserts. Dry supermarket savoiardi or a plain crisp sponge biscuit work.
- The measures are by weightThree ounces granulated sugar is about 6 to 7 tablespoons; two ounces almonds is a scant half cup whole. Weigh them if you can.
- Peach kernelsThe three kernels inside the stones are there for bitterness and perfume, the same role bitter almonds play in Italian baking. They contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide when ground, and modern practice is to leave them out; a few drops of pure almond extract or one crushed amaretto biscuit gives the same flavor note.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem is now hard to find outside specialist confectioners. Any firm candied fruit cut in small dice will do, though citron or candied orange peel is closer in texture than glacé cherry.
- Choose the fruit carefully"Not very ripe" is the hinge. Use freestone peaches that are firm and just fragrant, so the stones lift out cleanly and the halves hold their shape rather than collapsing into syrup.
- GrindingThe original assumes a mortar. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the almonds oil and the filling goes greasy.
- Pan and yieldTwelve halves need a shallow dish just large enough to hold them upright without tipping. The recipe says only to add the remaining ounce of sugar; scattering it over the tops is the usual reading. Serves six, warm or at room temperature.
This recipe comes from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (first published 1891), which reached English readers as The Italian Cook Book in Maria Gentile's 1919 abridgement. Stuffed peaches are a northern Italian household sweet, most strongly associated with Piedmont, where pesche ripiene are still made with crumbled amaretti in place of the almonds and kernels; Artusi's version uses savoiardi and whole sweet almonds pounded with the fruit's own kernels. The instruction to use fruit that is not very ripe is worth noting.