Peach Melba the way it used to be, should be
Sometimes we forget the most simple things. Which is why there has been such a trend in smart restaurants to serve up the old dishes that have been forgotten or so mistreated by years of sloppy cooking that they have been discredited. Thus lamb shanks, fish & chips, pesto, bread and butter pudding, a dozen others … and peach Melba.
My first peach Melba was a dessert in one of the old Coles cafeterias. Here we had sliced cling peaches from a tin, vanilla ice cream, and sickly raspberry sauce, the same desperately sweet concoction used in milk shakes. It was all a far cry from the turn-of-the-century dish created by Georges Auguste Escoffier for Dame Nellie Melba during one of her sojourns at London’s Savoy.
Singing must have been a fair little earner in those days. Melba stayed at the Savoy for a year during one of her seasons in London.
The legendary Frenchman seemed to have been pretty much at the top of his form when he created this favourite, presenting the poached peaches and vanilla bean ice cream in a swan cut from ice. It was served in a lightly sweetened raspberry sauce.
But now this brilliantly simple dish has been complicated and reduced to ridicule. If you put together the original ingredients the way they were meant to be, you will have something to sing about.
THE RASPBERRY SAUCE
1 cup best quality muscat, if you have it — It will add a wonderful richness to the raspberry sauce, but if you haven’t got it, don’t go out and buy it. A perfect raspberry puree, sweetened a little, is marvellous anyway.
20g caster sugar, depending on the natural sweetness of the raspberries
2 punnets of raspberries, most of them for the sauce, several for the plate
THE PEACHES
sugar to taste — Aim for about 100g sugar per litre of water.
water to cover 2 medium peaches per person
1
Bring the muscat and sugar to a simmer while stirring, and cook gently for a couple of minutes, until all the sugar has dissolved. Allow to cool a little, then add the raspberries, and bring to a simmer again, mixing the raspberries through the muscat — sugar mix. Cook for a couple of minutes more on a gentle heat. When the raspberries have softened, puree in a food machine, and sift the seeds from the sauce. Taste, adding more sugar if you need it — I doubt it, but you never know. Set aside to cool, then refrigerate.
2
Escoffier, and almost everybody else, suggests you halve and skin the peaches. I prefer to cook them as they are, in a very gentle syrup, then rub the skin from them and serve them whole. If you cook them in their skins and leave them that way overnight, the pigment in the skin will colour them deliciously, and they look marvellous on the plate. There’s only one difficulty. You have to impale them with a fork to eat them. It’s worth it — after all, we never complain about eating corn that way, do we?
So, make a syrup with the sugar and the water, bringing the solution to a gentle boil. If you have plenty of money, simmer with a vanilla bean, split through the middle. Return to a simmer and poach the peaches gently in an open pot until tender — 10–15 minutes, depending how many peaches you have in the pot. Once cooked, refrigerate them overnight in the syrup. Remove and discard the mottled skins, then return the peaches to the syrup. They must be very cold.
3
Make your own vanilla bean ice cream. It’s the only way. You will then have brought together three of the greatest of ingredients in cooking: vanilla bean, peaches, raspberries, and a pretty fair singer as well.
4
Serve two very cold peaches per person, with a little syrup still clinging; a large scoop of the ice cream; and the raspberry sauce poured over the ice cream with a little on the peaches. Scatter some fresh raspberries all about.
WINE: Botrytis is a mould that infects grapes late in their ripening and concentrates their sugar levels. It’s sometimes called Noble Rot. The great sweet wines of Bordeau (Sauternes and Barsac) and Germany are made from grapes thus affected. Australia is producing some wonderful botrytis styles. My favourites are De Bortoli’s, some of Wolf Blass’ and Lindemans.