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Peach Pickles
Pare freestone peaches, place in a stone jar, and pour over them boiling-hot syrup made in the proportion of one quart best cider Sept vinegar to three pints sugar; boil and skim, and pour over the 1903 fruit boiling hot, repeating each day until the fruit is the same color to the center, and the syrup like thin molasses. A few days before they are finished, place the fruit, after draining, in the jar to the depth of three or four inches, then sprinkle over bits of cinnamon bark and a few cloves, add another layer of fruit, then spice, and so on until the jar is full; scald the syrup each morning for three or four days after putting in the spice, and pour syrup boiling hot over fruit, and, if it is not sufficiently cooked, scald fruit with the syrup the last time. The proportion of spices to a gallon of fruit is, two tea-spoons whole cloves, four table-spoons cinnamon. To pickle clingstones, prepare syrup as for freestones; pare fruit, put in the syrup, boil until they can be pierced through with a silver fork; skim out, place in jar, pour the boiling syrup over them, and proceed and finish as above. As clings are apt to become hard when stewed in sweet syrup, it may often be necessary to add a pint of water the first time they are cooked, watching carefully until they are tender, or to use only part of the sugar at first, adding the rest in a day or two. Use the large White Heath clingstones if they are to be had. All that is necessary to keep sweet pickles is to have syrup enough to cover, and to keep the fruit well under. Scald with boiling syrup until fruit is of same color throughout, and syrup like thin molasses; watch every week, particularly if weather is warm, and if scum rises and syrup assumes a whitish appearance, boil, skim, and pour over the fruit. If at any time syrup is lacking, prepare more as at first. - Mrs. M. J. Woods.
This is a slow, open-crock sweet pickle: the fruit is never boiled to death, it is repeatedly steeped in reboiled syrup over a week or more until it candies through. The method works, but it assumes a cool cellar and daily attention.
- The hinge: color to the centerThe recipe's own test is the reliable one. The peaches are done when a cut half shows the same amber tone all the way through and the syrup ropes off the spoon like thin molasses. Rushing it with a hard boil gives you collapsed fruit in thin syrup.
- Syrup proportionOne quart cider vinegar to three pints sugar is 4 cups vinegar to 6 cups sugar, roughly 2 lb 10 oz by weight. Use 5 percent cider vinegar; nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely and was often weaker.
- Spice quantitiesTwo teaspoons whole cloves and four tablespoons cinnamon per gallon of fruit. A gallon of pared peach halves is about 6 to 7 lb of prepared fruit, so scale accordingly. Use cinnamon in broken bark, not ground, or the syrup turns muddy.
- VesselsA stone jar means a glazed stoneware crock. Any non-reactive container will do; the point is that the hot vinegar syrup must not touch bare iron, copper or aluminum. The silver fork specified in the clingstone directions was probably called for on the same principle, though the recipe does not say so.
- Clingstones need helpThe advice to add a pint of water, or hold back part of the sugar for a day or two, is sound. Sugar draws water out of firm cling flesh and sets it; a weaker first syrup lets the fruit soften before it candies. White Heath was a large late-season canning cling and is now rare, so any firm late freestone or cling will substitute.
- TimingThe recipe sets no total: scald daily until the fruit colors through, with the spices added only for the last three or four days, as directed.
- StorageOpen-crock keeping under syrup, watched weekly for scum, is not a method to rely on in a modern kitchen. Pack the finished fruit and syrup into sterilised jars and process by boiling-water canning following current tested times for peach pickles, or simply keep the batch refrigerated and eat it within a few weeks.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; make more syrup in the same proportion if the fruit is not well submerged, as it directs.
Sweet pickling — fruit steeped in a vinegar-and-sugar syrup with warm spices — was, by most accounts, one of the ways an American household turned a glut of orchard fruit into something that would sit on the table beside cold meat all winter. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and first published in the 1870s, is a contributed collection, and the credit to Mrs. M. J. Woods is typical of how such books were assembled: named neighbors supplying tested household practice rather than a single author's compositions. The care taken here to distinguish freestone from clingstone, and to name the White Heath by variety, reflects a period when cooks bought or grew fruit by cultivar and knew which behaved how in a kettle — a distinction largely lost once canneries and shipping standardized the peaches most people see.