Peach Pie
Line the sides of a granite or earthenware pudding dish with paste, fill with medium-sized ripe, but not soft, peaches, that have been pared, add to each quart of peaches a cupful of granulated sugar and a tablespoonful of flour mixed together, and cover with quite a thick sheet of paste. Bake until done, and when cold, serve with sweet cream.
This is a deep-dish pie with no bottom crust — paste up the sides only, fruit in the middle, a heavy lid on top. The original assumes you know your oven and your fruit, so the two things it leaves out are temperature and time.
- Granite dish"Granite" here means graniteware, the speckled enamel-on-steel pans common in turn-of-the-century kitchens. Any deep, non-reactive dish works — glass, stoneware, or enameled cast iron. Both materials the recipe names are non-reactive, which may well be the point, though the recipe does not say so.
- No bottom crustPaste lines the sides and covers the top; the fruit sits directly on the dish. This is deliberate in a juicy deep-dish pie, and it means you should serve it by the spoonful rather than trying to lift wedges.
- Whole peaches, and the stonesThe recipe pares but does not halve or pit. Peaches were sometimes cooked on the stone, and the kernels are often credited with a faint almond note, though the recipe says nothing of it. Either way it leaves stones in the finished pie. Halving and pitting is the safer service and costs nothing in flavor; if you leave them in, warn whoever is eating.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time. For a deep dish of raw fruit under a thick crust, start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set and color the paste, then drop to 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly at the edge.
- QuantitiesA quart of pared peaches is roughly 2 lb, or about 6 medium fruit. One cup of sugar to a quart is on the sweet side by current taste; two-thirds is closer to modern practice with good ripe fruit. The single tablespoon of flour is a light hand — expect a loose, syrupy pie rather than a sliceable one.
- Ripe but not softThe most useful line in the recipe. Soft peaches collapse into water under a long bake; fruit that still has resistance at the shoulder holds its shape and gives up juice slowly.
- Cut the crustA thick top sheet over wet fruit needs steam vents, or it lifts off the filling and stays raw underneath. Slash it before it goes in.
- Serving"Sweet cream" means plain unwhipped fresh cream, poured over. Serving cold is part of the recipe — the thin syrup firms slightly as it cools. The recipe gives no yield.
Peaches were one of the great American summer gluts of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period carry them in every possible form: preserved, pickled, dried, brandied, and baked. This recipe belongs to the deep-dish tradition of English fruit pies, and it shares its shape with the dishes Americans came to call cobblers and pandowdies — fruit in a dish with paste over the top, no bottom crust, and no pretense of being portable, though the lines of descent between these forms are not documented. The insistence on granite or earthenware is a practical note from an era when tinned iron bakeware was the cheap default, though the recipe itself gives no reason for the choice; it is often suggested that acidic fruit picked up a metallic taste from tin. Cooking stone fruit unpitted was ordinary practice and is often said to have been valued for the trace of almond flavor the kernels give, though it was as likely a matter of saving labor at the height of the season, when a household might put up bushels at a time.