French Fridays with Dorie - Peach (Pêche) Melba with Pumpkin Seed Brittle

Today´s recipe for the French Fridays with Dorie group is Peach (Pêche) Melba.

The Peach Melba is a well-known French dessert, invented around 1893 by the French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) at the Savoy Hotel, London to honour the Australian soprano, Nellie Melba (1861-1931). The classic elements of this dessert are vanilla ice cream, poached peaches, raspberry coulis, and slithered almonds. Crème Chantilly was added later. The original recipe was published in the “Guide Culinare”. I took the liberty of leaving out the almonds and making some pumpkin seed brittle to serve with this dessert instead.

Pumpkin seed brittle is wonderful with this dessert - I have seen so many "Peach Melbas" on so many restaurant, café and ice-cream parlor menues, that this seemed like a welcome "twist".

This is a classic dessert, particularly good in summer time not only because of the cool ice cream but also because it combines two terrific sweet summer fruits. This recipe is all about delicious vanilla ice cream, raspberry coulis, ripe Spanish pink peaches poached with sugar, a real vanilla bean, organic lemon peel and a few leaves of my lemon verbena plant, I love using this herb for baking and infusing teas, it has a wonderful lemon scent and it is a wonderful ingredient in Dorie´s recipe for the poaching liquid.

Less known desserts that Auguste Escoffier created for some other very famous ladies are the “Fraises Sarah Bernardt” (strawberries with ice cream and pineapple puree), “Poires Mary Garden” (poached pears with raspberry coulis and cream), or “Coup Emma Calvé” (poached cherries with ice cream and raspberry coulis) – seemingly long forgotten creations of this famous French Chef.

To see all the other Doristas´ summery creation of the Peach Melba, please click here.
This is the 100th post for this group from the book “Around my French Table” by Dorie Greenspan.
Congratulations to all the Doristas that actually managed to prepare all the 100 dishes so far!

Recipe for Pumpkin Seed Brittle

Ingredients

125 grams (4.4 ounces) pumpkin seeds (depending on how much brittle you would like to have, just weigh the pumpkin seeds and double the amount of sugar you are using)
250 grams (8.8 ounces) white sugar

Preparation

1. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a medium-sized (dry) pan, lighty roast the pumpkin seeds until they smell nutty and aromatic, do not forget to stir while roasting, set aside.
3. To a medium sized sauce pan, medium heat, add the sugar and let it caramelize until it turns a light amber color.
4. Add the roasted pumpkin seeds to the pan and stir right away, a wooden spoon works best.
5. Take the pan off the heat.
6. Then immediately spread the caramel onto the prepared baking sheet  -  BE CAREFUL: this is extremly hot and it is therefore a very good idea to keep a bowl of ice water close by, in case you get some hot and extremly sticky caramel on your fingers - instead of spreading it out, you can also make about twenty or so tablespoon sized rounds.
7. Let the caramel cool completely on the baking sheet.
8. Break into odd sized chunks and keep in a cookie tin between layers of parchment paper (no humidity, or the brittle will "sweat" and stick like crazy).