Peach Melba (french: pêche Melba, pronounced ) is a dessert of peaches and

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sauce with vanilla ice cream. It was invented in 1892 or 1893 by the French chef Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, London, to honour the Australian

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Nellie Melba.Avey, Tori
"Opera, Escoffier, and Peaches: The Story Behind the Peach Melba"
August 22, 2012, accessed 9 April 2015

History

In 1892, operatic soprano Nellie Melba was performing in Wagner's opera '' Lohengrin'' at

Covent Garden Covent Garden is a district in London, on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit-and-vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist si ...

. The

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gave a dinner party at the Savoy to celebrate her triumph. For the occasion, Escoffier presented Nellie with a dessert of fresh peaches served over vanilla ice cream in a silver dish perched atop an ice sculpture of a swan, which is featured in the opera. He originally called the dish ''Pêche au cygne'', or “peach with a swan.” A few years later Escoffier created a new version of the dessert: when Escoffier and César Ritz opened the Ritz Carlton in London (after both were sacked from the Savoy for larceny, embezzlement, and fraud), Escoffier changed the recipe slightly by adding a topping of sweetened raspberry purée and renamed the dish ''Pêche Melba''.

Variations

Other versions substitute pears, apricots, or strawberries instead of peaches or use raspberry sauce or melted redcurrant jelly instead of raspberry purée. The original dessert used simple ingredients of "tender and very ripe peaches, vanilla ice cream, and a purée of sugared raspberry". Escoffier himself is quoted as saying, "Any variation on this recipe ruins the delicate balance of its taste."

''Pijama''

Peach Melba is claimed to be the ancestor of the ''pijama'', a dessert in

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cuisine. 7 Portes, a famous restaurant in Barcelona founded in 1836, is credited with its creation in 1951, when officers of the U.S.

Sixth Fleet The Sixth Fleet is a numbered fleet of the United States Navy operating as part of United States Naval Forces Europe. The Sixth Fleet is headquartered at Naval Support Activity Naples, Italy. The officially stated mission of the Sixth Fleet in ...

stationed in the nearby harbor would often dine at 7 Portes and order peach Melba for dessert. The name mutated to ''pijama'' (,

for ''pajamas'') among the Catalan-speaking kitchen staff. From there the recipe, or the essence of it, spread throughout Catalonia. Variations are countless, but ice cream,

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, and fruit in syrup (peach and/or pineapple) are its staple ingredients. Though regarded as an extravagant and somewhat outdated dish today, the pijama was considered part of the corpus of the

Catalan cuisine Catalan cuisine is the cuisine from Catalonia. It may also refer to the shared cuisine of Northern Catalonia and Andorra, the second of which has a similar cuisine to that of the neighbouring Alt Urgell and Cerdanya ''comarques'' and which i ...

and its recipe was included in the inventory published by the Foundation of the Catalan Institute of Cuisine and Gastronomical Culture.

Cultural significance

In tribute to Escoffier an elaborate deconstruction of the peach Melba was served as the last dish at elBulli prior to its closure in 2012.

References

{{Nellie Melba, state=autocollapse Food and drink introduced in the 1890s Frozen desserts Fruit dishes Vanilla ice cream Peaches Nellie Melba French desserts

History

Variations

''Pijama''

Cultural significance

See also

References