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Dessert

Suedoise of Peaches

A layered peach dessert made with peach pulp, halves, syrup, and garnished with macaroons or ratafias.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Suedoise of Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the peaches

  1. Boil the sugar in water until it forms a clear syrup.

  2. Gently simmer 6 ripe peaches in the syrup for 6 to 8 minutes.

  3. Carefully lift out the peaches from the syrup.

  4. Peel and halve the peaches.

  5. Soak the peach halves in half the syrup.

Make the pulp

  1. Pare and halve 2 pounds of peaches.

  2. Boil the peach halves until they form a smooth pulp.

  3. Sweeten the pulp to taste.

  4. Add lemon juice to the pulp.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread a layer of pulp in a dish.

  2. Arrange the soaked peach halves on top.

  3. Fill gaps between halves with pulp.

  4. Insert half a blanched peach kernel into each peach.

  5. Pour the reduced syrup over the dish.

  6. Garnish with macaroons or ratafias.

  7. Top with the remaining peach halves and serve.

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.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Ripe peaches
Provide the main fruit flavour and the body of the smooth pulp.
Refined sugar
Sweetens the dish and forms the syrup that flavours and moistens the peaches.
Strained lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet peach flavour.

The step that matters

Gently simmer the peaches. Gentle simmering cooks the fruit through while keeping the halves intact. A hard boil breaks down the flesh and makes the syrup cloudy, so the halves lose their shape.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, peach):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, peach. 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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