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Peaches in Custard
Select large ripe free-stone peaches. Peel them carefully. Open each just far enough to enable you to extract the stone and to slip into its place a maraschino cherry. Have ready a custard made by cooking together in a double boiler three cupfuls of milk and four tablespoonfuls of sugar, until the milk is scalding hot and the sugar entirely dissolved and then adding slowly the separately beaten yolks and whites of five eggs. Stir the custard constantly until it thickens, and let it become thoroughly cold before flavoring it with a little maraschino. When this has been done, dip each peach in the custard and then sprinkle it with powdered sugar. Arrange the peaches in a deep dish and put this in ice. It may be set in a pan and cracked ice heaped about it that the fruit may be completely chilled. Set the custard also where it will become very cold. Just before serving, pour the remainder of the custard around the peaches, not over them, and heap whipped cream on top of the fruit. This dessert is especially good when made from fresh peaches, but in winter the preserved fruit may be used.
A stirred custard and raw fruit, so the whole thing lives or dies on the custard not curdling. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: custard temperatureWhole eggs — yolks and whites — bring in white, which coagulates at a lower temperature than yolk, so this thickens and curdles sooner than a yolk-only crème anglaise. Keep it over barely simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it as soon as it coats a spoon — nearer 170F than the 180F usually quoted for anglaise. Strain through a fine sieve into a cold bowl the moment it is off the heat.
- Freestone peachesThe instruction is not decoration: a clingstone will tear apart when you dig the pit out. Look for freestone varieties, ripe but still firm enough to hold their shape, and peel them by dipping 30 seconds in boiling water then into ice water.
- Maraschino, two formsThe cherries and the flavoring were both maraschino — cherries preserved in Maraschino liqueur, a clear spirit distilled from Marasca cherries, pits included, at Zara. The bright red corn-syrup cherry sold today is a different product. Use good cocktail cherries, and flavor the custard with a tablespoon or so of actual maraschino liqueur, or kirsch.
- Cupfuls and tablespoonfulsThree cups milk, four tablespoons sugar, five eggs — the measures translate directly. Whole milk is intended; skim will taste thin and set poorly.
- "Put this in ice"The pan of cracked ice is an icebox-era workaround. Refrigerate the dressed peaches and the reserved custard separately for at least two hours; both should be thoroughly cold before the dish is put together.
- Dipping and sugaringDip the peaches while the custard is cold, or it will slide off. The powdered sugar dulls and dissolves on a wet surface within an hour or two, so sugar them shortly before serving rather than when they go into the cold.
- Pour around, not overThe point of the instruction is visual — the sugared, cream-topped peaches stay distinct in a pool of custard. If you flood them the dish reads as a bowl of soup.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; the quantity of custard should serve roughly six to eight peaches, allowing one per person. Preserved peach halves, as the book suggests for winter, are best drained well and pressed back into pairs around the cherry.
This belongs to the era when a cold stirred custard was often said to be the default dressing for fruit at the polite table, before gelatin desserts and commercial ice cream came into favor. The maraschino cherry sitting where the stone was is the tell: genuine Maraschino, distilled from Marasca cherries around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was a fashionable American flavoring at the turn of the century, and cherries steeped in it were an expensive imported garnish rather than the dyed sweet cherry the name later came to mean. The closing note that "in winter the preserved fruit may be used" places the recipe firmly in a household that put up its own peaches ill a a summer memory in a jar, and cookbooks of this period are known to have offered both versions of a dish for that reason.