I’ve been a Katharine Hepburn recipe evangelist for a long time now. Her brownies, which are dense, fudgy, absurdly simple, have been my go-to for nearly 20 years since I discovered them in an article from Saveur (I still have the ripped magazine page in my recipe binder…how analog of me!). So when I came across another recipe credited to her, one described, verbatim, as “this interesting summer salad,” I knew I had to try it.
Katharine Hepburn’s Peach Salad starts out simple enough, then takes a bit of a wild turn: “Mix cream cheese with chopped roasted almonds, and use the mixture to fill the centers of halves of peaches. Serve on lettuce with whipped cream, and garnish with whole almonds, salted.” I was with her until whipped cream on lettuce, which sounds like something from a 1940s ladies’ luncheon fever dream. I made it anyway.
How to Make Katharine Hepburn’s Peach Salad
The recipe as it was published originally reads just like something your grandmother might have jotted down on an index card back in the day—that is to say it was both brief and a tad vague. Here’s the step-by-step (including amounts) of what I did to recreate Katharine’s salad.
- Let half a block (4 oz.) of cream cheese soften at room temperature, then stir in 3 Tbsp. of finely chopped roasted almonds until combined.
- Halve and pit 2 ripe peaches. Fill the cavity of each half generously with the cream cheese mixture.
- Arrange each peach half, filling-side up, on a crisp lettuce leaf. (I used 1 large romaine leaf per peach half.)
- Whip ½ cup heavy cream to soft peaks and spoon it over the peaches and lettuce. Garnish with a couple more tablespoons of whole or coarsely chopped salted almonds and serve right away.
Tips for Making Katharine Hepburn’s Peach Salad
A few things worth knowing before you try it yourself:
- Make sure your cream cheese is softened before mixing in the almonds, or you’ll be fighting lumps. Set it on the counter for 30 minutes to an hour and you should be good to go. To speed up the process, you can cut the cream cheese into cubes first.
- Leave the sugar out of your whipped cream. Sweeten it and you’ve got dessert on top of lettuce. Unsweetened, you’ve got a cool, barely-there dressing that complements the naturally sweet peaches.
- Use a crispier lettuce like romaine, iceberg, or even little gem. You want the salad to have some crunch to counter the soft peaches and billowy cream. You could even turn this into a fun wedge salad-like situation, by slicing an inch cross-section of romaine and setting the peach on top of that.
- Opt for roasted, salted almonds—you need the salt to balance the sweet peaches. Plus, a toasted nut is far more flavorful and you want it to provide more than mere crunch.
- Think of this as a small plate or starter salad. One or two peach halves per person is plenty for a serving.
- Assemble right before serving. Both the whipped cream and the filled peaches lose their texture if they sit too long.
The Verdict on Katharine Hepburn’s Peach Salad
“Interesting” was right. But not in a bad way! More in a fun, quirky vintage recipe kind of way. I knew the peach-cream-cheese-almond combo would be delicious. And it was. My peak-season fruit was perfectly juicy and ripe, which played well with the tang of the cream cheese and the roasty, toasty crunch of the almonds. (In fact, put that in your back pocket for an easy snack—peach slices smeared with cream cheese and sprinkled with some almonds. Yum!)
The real surprise, though, was the whipped cream. Once I adjusted to the idea that it was unsweetened, I could wrap my head around eating it with a lettuce leaf, and the clever play on peaches-and-cream was a little funky but delightfully offbeat. It may not become a go-to recipe in the same way Katharine’s brownies have, but it was an amusing project for a hot summer day, and it has me itching to pore over my grandmother’s old cookbooks I’ve got lying in the basement somewhere.
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