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Dessert

Peaches Baked

A baked dish of peaches on bread, sweetened with sugar and butter, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 114 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Peaches Baked

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a rather slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

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

  2. Cut the peaches in half and remove the stones.

  3. Butter a bakepan and place a slice of bread in it.

  4. Place half a peach on each slice of bread, skin side down.

Bake and serve

  1. Dust the peaches with sugar and add a piece of butter on top.

  2. Bake until cooked, then serve warm with any juice or syrup of pears if needed.

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 + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Peach + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Bread + peartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit, sweetness and juice that moisten the bread as it bakes.
Bread
Forms the base that soaks up peach juices and holds the fruit.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that helps the surface brown and gives a rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the peaches and helps their surface caramelize slightly in the oven.

Swap the pear

The recipe marks pear as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, bread, sugar, butter, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, bread, sugar, butter, syrup. 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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