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Peach Delights
1 quart flour. 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt Milk 1 egg 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Peaches, fresh or canned Whipped cream Sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder together, then rub Crisco lightly into them with finger tips; add lemon extract and enough milk to make soft dough. Drop mixture into Criscoed gem pans; place 1/2 peach on each one; fill cavities with sugar and bake in hot oven twenty-five minutes. Serve with whipped and sweetened cream.
Sufficient for twenty delights.
A shortcake-style drop biscuit baked with half a peach pressed into the top. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before you start.
- The flour is missingFlour is called for in the method but never given a quantity in the list. For a dough of this type — 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 cup fat, 1 egg — 2 cups of flour is the proportion that fits, but the original is genuinely silent and you are reconstructing it.
- The egg is orphaned tooOne egg is listed and never mentioned again. Beat it into the milk and count it toward the liquid; otherwise leave it out and use milk alone. Either produces a workable dough.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan, its cups shallower and often oval compared with a modern tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the yield of twenty suggests cups smaller than today's.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-425F; the book gives no temperature, so this is an approximation of the period term. Twenty-five minutes at that heat is right for a biscuit dough in a muffin cup — check at twenty, since the peach juice can make the tops look wetter than they are.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so every fat is Crisco. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same; butter gives better flavour. Rub it in until the mixture looks like coarse meal and stop.
- "Criscoed"Period shorthand for greased. Grease the cups well — the sugar filling the peach cavity caramelises and will weld the delights in place otherwise.
- The peachesCanned halves should be drained and patted dry or the dough beneath goes soggy. Fresh peaches want to be ripe but firm; a free-stone variety halves cleanly.
- Yield and servingTwenty small cakes, meant warm and eaten the day they are baked. The sweetened whipped cream is not optional — the dough itself carries only two tablespoons of sugar for the whole batch.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent: a shelf-stable, hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a replacement for both lard and butter. The recipes are conventional home cooking of the period, rewritten so that Crisco appears in every one, and shortcakes and drop doughs recur, being exactly the places where a solid fat rubbed into flour proves itself. Peach shortcake in individual portions was already familiar — strawberry shortcake's summer cousin — and canned peaches, listed here as an equal alternative to fresh, were by 1913 widely available in the American pantry. The book's occasional gaps, like the missing flour quantity here, suggest a reader who was assumed to know roughly what a biscuit dough should feel like.