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36 Heirloom Recipe Begin by looking for peaches. Search out the humblest fruit, the blistered seconds sweating the bottoms from paper bags in the heat at a roadside stand.You want them battered, already sliding from their soft skins, hardly a cut needed. Slice them into the cool ceramic of your mother’s mother’s bowl, its pattern scoured off; sugar them and let them weep their juices till the sweet grit dissolves. Dust them with flour so fine it feels like silk in your hands, and let them rest at the bottom of a heavy pan. Measure flour again and sift it with baking soda bright as laundry, then break an egg in the center like a nest. Shake the milk in its heavy bottle to mix in the cream and pour it over, thick as a blanket. The batter should be thin under one hundred beats from your flashing whisk before you add a spoonful of clear vinegar— the kind for washing windows in the spring. The batter should bubble like lace over the slick peaches, which have spun themselves into a glaze. Know the oven is wayward and may or may not hold heat, that you must watch the cobbler as it bakes, as if it were not made from simple things. You will know it’s done when the top cracks to reveal a color you’ve never seen but have always wanted, a gold like polished wood or firelight, the color of a home’s lit windows at night. ...

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