Peach Cream Pie Recipe
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Some more recipes this week and additions to our series on food writers. Arden H. Duane wrote a food column for the Associated Negro Press (ANP), the Chicago wire service that supplied stories to more than two hundred papers each week from Norfolk to Los Angeles for a subscription fee most publishers could afford. In August 1936 the Norfolk Journal and Guide ran her peach column, and Duane opened it with an admission that a lot of food writers would have skipped. Peaches were scarce that summer, she wrote, and priced a little above what the family food budget could stand. Then she built three desserts around them anyway. That is the whole argument of her column in two sentences: the fruit costs more than you want to pay, so here are recipes to make them go further. The cream pie comes first because it demands the least. Half a cup of sugar, two spoons of flour, a cup of cream, and one unbaked shell turn six or eight peaches into six servings. A cook selling dessert by the slice at a church supper or a Saturday sales table could run that math in her head and know exactly what she stood to clear. Duane closed the column by offering eight more peach recipes to any reader who mailed a request and a loose three-cent stamp to her at 3507 South Parkway, Chicago. Knowledge for the price of a stamp, moving from a woman in Chicago to a woman in Virginia, is a small transaction with large consequences.
Peach Cream Pie Recipe
Serves six
Ingredients
½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup cream
6 to 8 fresh peaches
1 uncooked pie shell
Directions
Mix the sugar and flour well. Add the cream and stir until smooth. Peel and halve the peaches, removing the pits, and lay the halves in the pie shell cut side up. Pour the cream mixture over all and bake in a hot oven for no more than ten minutes, just long enough to set the crust. Reduce the heat to moderate so the filling bakes through before the crust is done. Serve slightly warm or cold.
Arden Duane, “Peach Receipes Are Given By Arden Duane,” New Journal and Guide, August 8, 1936, p. 9.
