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Peach Marmalade
Choose ripe, well-flavored fruit, and it is well to make with pre. serves, reserving for marmalade those that are too soft. The flavor is improved by first boiling the pits in the water with which the syrup is to be made. Quarter the peaches and boil thirty minutes before adding sugar, stirring almost constantly from the time the peaches begin to be tender; add sugar in the proportion of threefourths pound sugar to one pound fruit, continue to boil and stir for an hour longer, and put up in jars, pressing paper over them as directed for jellies.
A plain long-boil peach preserve with no pectin and no jars-and-lids procedure, both of which need translating. The garbled line near the start is a printer's error: it should read "it is well to make the best fruit into preserves, reserving for marmalade those that are too soft."
- The ratio, in modern termsThree-quarters pound sugar to one pound fruit works out to roughly 1 3/4 cups sugar per pound of prepared peaches. Four pounds of peaches and 3 pounds of sugar fills roughly five or six half-pint jars.
- Skip the pitsPeach kernels contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide when the kernel is broken. Whole pits simmered briefly in water are the traditional flavoring and were long used this way, but there is no reason to court it — a split vanilla bean, a strip of lemon peel or a spoonful of almond extract at the end gives the same faintly bitter-almond note.
- Peel or notThe recipe says only to quarter the fruit. Many nineteenth-century recipes direct scalding the peaches and slipping off the skins first; leaving skins on gives a rustic, flecked marmalade that is perfectly good but coarser.
- The cooking time is far too longThirty minutes before sugar plus a full hour after likely reflects thin, watery fruit cooked over an uneven range. Cook by state rather than clock: after the sugar dissolves, boil hard and start testing at 20 to 30 minutes. It is done at about 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed.
- Stirring is the hinge"Stirring almost constantly" is not fussiness. Once the sugar is in, the mixture scorches on the bottom in seconds and the burnt taste cannot be cooked out. Use a wide heavy pan, a flat-edged wooden spatula, and keep the bottom moving.
- Paper seals do not keepThe paper covering directed for jellies relies on a sugar concentration high enough to be self-preserving and on a cool cellar. Fill hot into clean canning jars and process in a boiling-water bath according to current tested guidance, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- TextureWith no added pectin this sets soft — a thick, spreadable conserve rather than a firm jam. That is what the book intends.
"Marmalade" in an American household book of this vintage rarely means orange; it means any fruit cooked to a pulp with sugar until it holds its shape, from the Portuguese marmelada, a paste of quinces (marmelo). The instruction to reserve overripe fruit for marmalade and the best for whole preserves is the real logic of the page: Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from Ohio contributors) was written for households putting up an entire summer's peach crop by hand, where fruit was graded on the kitchen table irfirm halves in syrup for company, bruised and soft ones boiled down for everyday bread-and-butter. Long boiling was the thickener most readily at hand, though cooks also blended in pectin-rich or underripe fruit; commercial pectin did not reach home cooks until the 1910s, which is why these recipes call for an hour at the stove and a great deal of sugar.