Peach Cardinal is a classic of French cuisine: poached peaches with raspberry sauce. You will love this recipe! By the way: There is still a very old, yellow-fleshed peach variety with this name, which is now very rare to find.
What is Peach Cardinal?
Peach Cardinal is a classic French dessert made with poached peaches served with raspberry sauce and whipped cream. The peaches are cooked in vanilla sugar water and topped with sweet raspberry puree and cream. A variant is peach Melba with vanilla ice cream.
Old, almost forgotten peach variety
Peach trees of the “Cardinal” variety are rarely offered in any tree nursery or even in a garden center. It is a peach that ripens at the end of August / beginning of September and has a dark red skin and yellow to red flesh. The fruits are medium-sized and are described as very juicy and sweet. Like all yellow-fleshed peaches, the Cardinal peach is quite sensitive to frost and other unfavorable weather and soil conditions, which is why it thrives best in warm regions. The origins of this peach are in the USA.
Peach Cardinal: Delicious peach dessert
It's hard to imagine French cuisine without this classic dessert: peaches with raspberry puree. A variation of this dessert is Peach Melba, which also comes with melt-in-the-mouth vanilla ice cream. And here is the recipe:
- Take four large and firm peaches.
- Cut each in half and remove the core.
- Boil water in a large pot and dissolve 200 grams of sugar in it.
- Let the sugar water boil for three minutes.
- Scrape out the pulp of a vanilla bean.
- Reduce the heat.
- Add the peach halves and vanilla to the sugar water.
- Let the peaches simmer on the lowest heat for about 15 minutes.
- In the meantime, press 250 grams of raspberries through a sieve.
Mix a tablespoon each of powdered sugar and raspberry spirit (raspberry juice for children).
- Beat 125 milliliters of whipped cream with a packet of vanilla sugar until stiff.
- Arrange the al dente poached peach halves on a dessert plate with raspberry puree and whipped cream. The dessert tastes even better if you add a tablespoon of sugar and vanilla extract instead of vanilla sugar
- This gives the cream a finer vanilla flavor than the artificial flavor from the vanilla sugar.
Tips & Tricks
Serve Peach Cardinal with vanilla or chocolate ice cream. If you like something a little more unusual, mocha ice cream also tastes very good. The whole thing can be rounded off with a small dash of eggnog over the cream.
