Home › Supper › Pickled Peaches
Pickled Peaches
Six pounds sugar, one quart vinegar, spice them by sticking one clove in each peach; pour the sugar and vinegar over them cold; set the jar in a pot of boiling water and keep them there until they boil nicely and are tender. A little cinnamon tied in a cloth and boiled with them is an improvement.
A sweet-sour peach pickle of the type that stood beside cold ham on a supper table. The instructions are complete except for the one thing you most want to know: how many peaches.
- The missing quantityNo weight of fruit is given. Six pounds of sugar to a quart of vinegar makes enough syrup for something on the order of 7-8 lb of peaches. Scale the syrup down proportionally if you are working with 2-3 lb.
- Set the jar in boiling waterThis is not canning as we mean it. The jar is being used as a double boiler so the sugar cannot scorch and the fruit cannot break up in a rolling boil. Any heatproof jar or bowl in a pan of simmering water does the same job; a heavy nonreactive pot over low heat is close enough.
- Vinegar strengthModern cider or white vinegar is a standardised 5 percent acetic acid. Nineteenth-century household vinegar was variable in strength, so do not dilute, and do not substitute a low-acid specialty vinegar if you want the pickle to keep.
- Peaches: peel or notThe recipe is silent. Peeled clingstones are the usual choice for whole spiced peaches, the skins loosened by 30-40 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold. Skins left on may slip off into the syrup during cooking and cloud it.
- One clove per peachPush the clove into the fruit near the stem end so it stays put. This is a real dose — clove is assertive, and a peach studded with two or three will taste of nothing else.
- The cinnamon bagTying spice in cloth is the period's spice bag. A square of muslin or a tea filter works; loose cinnamon bark is fine too, but ground cinnamon will turn the syrup muddy.
- Judging tenderCold syrup poured over raw fruit means a slow, even heating, which is what keeps the peaches whole. Start testing with a skewer once the fruit is simmering: it should meet no resistance but the fruit should still hold its shape. Peaches cooked past that point collapse into jam.
- Cold syrup, warm patienceThe syrup will seem thin when the fruit is done. It thickens as the peaches sit and give up juice, so resist boiling it down while the fruit is still in it.
- StorageThere is no sealing step here, so treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a few weeks. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath recipe with its own headspace and processing times.
Pickled peaches belong to the sweet-pickle family that dominated American supper and relish tables from the mid-nineteenth century onward, alongside pickled pears, watermelon rind and spiced crabapples. The logic is preservation first: a heavy sugar syrup sharpened with vinegar and armed with clove and cinnamon keeps summer fruit usable through winter, and the resulting sweet-sour flavour was valued precisely because it cut through the cold roast meats and hams that made up an evening meal. The clove-studded peach is the signature detail, and it points back to a much older European habit of piercing fruit and onions with cloves both for flavour and, in earlier centuries, because spice was believed to help preserve. Its place at supper is worth noticing: in a household with a hot midday dinner, supper was a cold, assembled meal, and a jar of pickled peaches was condiment and treat at once.