August is National Peach Month, and it’s easy to see why. The markets are full of peaches now, all bursting ripe and fragrant; and it won’t be many weeks before the lovely fruits are gone.
I’ve read that their season is so short because peach trees ripen all their fruits at once, rather than in succession over the growing season, as other fruit trees do. So it behooves us to eat peaches as often as we can while they’re at their luscious summer best, and avoid the flavorless, rock-hard, never-ripening things that agribusiness calls peaches during the rest of the year.
In that spirit, I made an excellent peach cake the other day, adapting a recipe for pear cake that appears in my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen. It’s a quick and easy cake to make, with just one mixing bowl and no separating of eggs. The only extravagant thing about it is the 10 tablespoons of butter that go into a 9- or 10-inch cake. This is the original recipe:
.
For my peach version, I creamed unsalted Irish butter with the confectioner’s sugar and beat in two jumbo eggs. I sifted in a cup of cake flour and the baking powder, and beat it into a smooth batter. I spread the batter in the baking dish and arranged three sliced peaches over the top.
.
The cake baked at 350° for 45 minutes. As it cooked, it scented half the apartment with the warm, sweet essence of peaches. The batter obligingly rose up around the fruit to fill the dish but not enough to spill over, and the surface turned a pretty golden brown.
.
Experimentally, this time I’d tried a few changes from the pear version of the recipe. Because I had jumbo eggs, I used two instead of three; and because I had cake flour in the pantry I used it instead of all-purpose. (The lower protein content of cake flour is supposed to give cakes more structure and tenderness.) Also, I skipped the indicated topping of granulated sugar before baking. None of those changes seemed to harm the cake any: It was a delightful summer dessert.
.
And the next morning, when Beloved Spouse took the remaining cake out of the refrigerator, cut himself a slice, spread it with butter, and warmed it in the toaster oven, he declared it to be an excellent summer breakfast too. Happy Peach Month, everyone!
Fresh fruit cakes are so good, and the crumb filling in the gaps around the fruit is tempting. Our peaches have not yet come in. Guess yours come from the Hudson Valley.
No, not the Hudson Valley this year. The NY Times said this on Monday in an article about peaches:
“This particular year lives in infamy for what farmers in the Northeast are calling the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” An arctic blast of subzero air on Feb. 13 and 14 killed the buds on peach trees, which had been rendered vulnerable by weeks of milder-than-usual temperatures. The flash freeze severely cut fruit production in New Jersey and southern New York; in New England and parts of the Hudson Valley, most peach farmers lost their entire crop.”
Happily, I buy excellent peaches from Kernan Farms, which comes to our Greenmarkets from southwestern New Jersey.