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Dessert

Baked Peaches

A baked peach dessert with sugar, butter, cinnamon, lemon juice, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Baked Peaches

Why it works: Peach and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 625 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Baked Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Halve the peaches and remove the stones.

  3. In a bowl, mix sugar, butter, and cinnamon to create a paste.

  4. Fill the peach halves with the sugar paste.

Bake and top

  1. Bake the peaches slowly, basting with lemon juice syrup.

  2. Whip egg whites with cream of tartar until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread meringue over the baked peaches and brown lightly.

  4. Serve hot or cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into meringue, they form a light foam that sets and browns on top of the peaches.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the peaches caramelize and brown slightly as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat to the sugar paste, giving the filling richness and helping it coat the peaches.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the peach flavour and syrup used for basting.
Cream of tartar
Stabilises the whipped egg whites so the meringue holds its stiff peaks.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg white meringue. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff peaks form. Fat or leftover yolk prevents foaming, and under-whipping leaves a runny topping that will not hold its shape or brown evenly.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, cinnamon, lemon, egg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, cinnamon, lemon, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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