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Dried Peaches in Sugar
It is a good plan to choose a very hot day for this process and finish them early in the morning. When the sun is hot enough, they can be dried in one day. This may be done in a cool oven, but they lack the fine flavor of the sundried peach. Pare fine yellow peaches and cut them in halves, taking out the stones. Drop into boiling syrup made of four cups of sugar to one cup and a half of water. This quantity will be sufficient for six pounds of peaches. Let the fruit simmer till tender. It will begin to have a transparent look when ready. Lift each peach very carefully, roll in powdered sugar, and lay on a platter. Set in the sun to dry. If syrup oozes from them, remove to a dry dish. When perfectly dry, pack in a jar with sugar about them. When preparing for use, let soak over night, and stew in the same water. They will be found to have as fine a flavor as the canned peaches, and will keep any length of time.
This is candied fruit as much as dried fruit: the peaches are poached in a heavy syrup, sugar-coated, then dried until firm. A few points make the difference between glossy halves that keep and sticky ones that mold.
- The hinge: cook to translucency, not to softnessThe peaches are ready when they take on the glassy look the recipe describes, which means the syrup has penetrated and displaced water in the flesh. Pulled too early they will stay wet in the center and spoil; boiled hard they collapse. Keep the syrup at a bare simmer and move the pan off heat rather than letting it gallop.
- The syrupFour cups sugar to one and a half cups water is a heavy syrup, roughly 2.7:1 by volume, thick enough that it will thread if you let it go. Six pounds of peaches is roughly 16 to 20 medium fruit, and they will release their own juice as they cook, thinning the syrup as you go.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period the term generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Either works for the coating; modern confectioners' sugar actually helps, since the starch absorbs surface moisture.
- The oven optionA "cool oven" of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 200 to 250F, propped open. A dehydrator at 135 to 145F is the practical modern substitute and gives more even results than sun-drying, whatever the original says about flavor.
- If you do dry outdoorsUse screens or racks so air circulates underneath, cover with cheesecloth or fine netting against insects, and bring the trays in before evening dew. A single hot day is optimistic for anything but thin, very ripe halves; two to three days is more usual, and the fruit should be brought inside each night.
- Judging "perfectly dry"The halves should be leathery and pliable with no tackiness and no bead of syrup when pressed. Any that still weep have sugar syrup sitting on the surface and will attract mold in the jar. Pack loosely in sugar and check the jar after a week; if you see condensation, dry the fruit further.
- Yield and useUse -- Beyond the overnight soak-and-stew the recipe suggests, these are good chopped into cakes and puddings or eaten as candied fruit straight from the jar.
- Storage"Any length of time" assumed a cool dry larder. Keep the jar sealed away from light and heat; refrigeration or freezing removes all doubt and costs nothing in texture.
Drying was the oldest and cheapest way to hold a peach crop, and it long outlasted the arrival of the glass canning jar. Plain sun-dried peach halves were common in American farm kitchens, spread on boards or roofs and turned by hand, but they dried to a dull, tough, faintly leathery thing. Poaching the fruit in heavy syrup first, as here, follows the long-established technique of candied fruit and produces something closer to a confection, a preserve that keeps like a dried fruit but eats like a sweetmeat. The comparison the writer draws at the end is telling: canned peaches had become the standard against which everything else was measured, and a sun-dried method had to argue for itself on flavor.