I love Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I like books where people are miserable and come to bad ends. That’s also why I am a Zola fan; I think it’s because somehow it makes me feel better when I’m done.

And so: Poor, beautiful Lily Bart. Abandoned financially by her aunt, from whom she was expecting a large inheritance, we watch her fall steadily downward from desirable, fashionable socialite at glittering parties, holding men in the palm of her hand, to boarding in a single room in a walk-up apartment building, depending on the kindness of friends to keep her afloat, and then finally, dismally, wretchedly, working at a millinery, drowning in debt. I won’t tell you how it ends, except to say, there is a sleeping draught involved. We all know how that works out in literature.

In this passage, Lily is at a fancy dinner with her socialite friends and finally grasps that her position in society is tenuous at best, and likely unraveling before her eyes. Her once-friend Mrs. Trenor greets her with cool civility rather than the warmth Lily was expecting, and Lily then knows her gilded time is short. She is left both deciding on her dessert and pondering her future.

…even Rosedale, flushed as he was with the importance of keeping such company, at once took the temperature of Mrs. Trenor’s cordiality and reflected it in his off- hand greeting of Miss Bart. Trenor, red and uncomfortable, had cut short his salutations on the pretext of a word to say to the head waiter; and the rest of the group soon melted away in Mrs. Trenor’s wake.

It was over in a moment; the waiter, menu in hand, still hung on the choice between Coupe Jacques and Peche a la Melba, but Miss Bart, in the interval, had taken the measure of her fate. Where Judy Trenor led all the world would follow, and Lily had the doomed sense of the castaway who has signalled in vain to fleeing sails.

There: don’t you feel better now? Have some dessert.

You will need:

1 can of good quality peaches
butter
good vanilla ice cream
seedless raspberry jam or all-fruit; I did see in some old recipes that strawberry sauce was used also

Peach Melba is extraordinarily simple: poached peaches over vanilla ice cream with a raspberry sauce. It is very delicious and my dad’s favorite. Legend says that the famous chef Georges Escoffier prepared it for the singer Nellie Melba, after hearing her sing. Unfortunately, it is March right now and there are no peaches! But I need something easy and quick to do for this entry, so we will compromise and make do with what we have. Jacques Pepin, in his Fast Food My Way, has a recipe where he uses canned apricots for his clafoutis. If it’s good enough for Jacques, it’s good enough for me. Canned peaches it is. (Although I’ll also tell you what to do with the fresh peaches if you want to make that too.)

Find a good quality canned peach in syrup. You can use halves or slices. I meant to use halves but picked up the wrong can, and wasn’t going back to the store for a third time today. As it turned out, I think it looks fine and it was a lot easier not to have to cut up the peach halves with a spoon to eat them!

I put all of the peaches, a little of their syrup and two tablespoons of butter in a sauce pan. Cook it just until the syrup and butter combine into a nice sauce. Believe it or not, I added a teaspoon of sugar to this, as it just wasn’t sweet enough. If you use unsalted butter, you may want to add a pinch of salt.

Strain the butter/peach juice liquid into another pan, and to that add about a half cup of jam. Now cook that down and whisk it, until it coats the back of a spoon nicely. Let it cool a little so it doesn’t melt your ice cream too fast. Scoop the ice cream into a bowl, arrange peach slices around it, and pour syrup over top. And then pity poor Lily Bart, who probably didn’t enjoy her dessert as she should have.

(Alternatively, you can poach four fresh peach halves in a simple syrup. According to The Joy of Cooking, simple syrup is: 1 1/4 cup sugar to a quart of water, stirred together and cooked until it makes a syrup. Poach your peaches gently in the syrup and set aside to cool.)

Peaches in butter with a little of their own syrup. Pour out the buttery liquid to use for your jam sauce.

Add about a half cup of jam to the buttery liquid, and whisk and simmer.

Raspberry sauce is ready when it coats the spoon. Set aside to cool a bit so that it won’t melt your ice cream.

I had store bought sugar cookies in the pantry so I added it to the bowl.

Of course Potterheads love Peach Melba! Just like Pop Pop.

This recipe comes from the January 11, 1925 edition of the The Dayton Daily News. In it, New York newspaperman Karl K. Kitchen describes meeting Chef Escoffier, and being told that the legendary story of his invention of Peach Melba was not entirely… — This recipe comes from the January 11, 1925 edition of the The Dayton *Daily News.* In it, New York newspaperman Karl K. Kitchen describes meeting Chef Escoffier, and being told that the legendary story of his invention of Peach Melba was not entirely true. He did prepare it often for Nellie Melba, he told Kitchen, as she and her guests at the Carlton Hotel were fond of it, but claims in this article that he never did hear her sing.