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Peach Marmalade (If you have a quantity of less)
If you have a quantity of less choice halves of peaches use these for marmalade. Cut them up, and, if ripe enough, press through a potato ricer or mash fine with a silver spoon. Add an equal amount of sugar to the pulp, the juice of one lemon, and a dozen peach kernels. Cook very slowly half an hour, stirring frequently to prevent burning.
This is a thrift recipe — a use for the bruised and irregular peach halves left after the choice fruit went into jars. Two things in it put it outside what can be made today.
- The peach kernels are the problemA dozen peach kernels cooked into the marmalade is the reason this should not be made as written. Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which breaks down on contact with moisture and plant enzymes into hydrogen cyanide together with benzaldehyde, the compound that gives the bitter-almond flavour the recipe is after. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and some will be driven off in a slow half-hour cook, but there is no way to know from the instruction how much amygdalin a dozen kernels of unknown variety and ripeness carry, or how much remains at the end.
- Not the same as almond extractCooks who see this instruction sometimes assume it is equivalent to a spoon of almond flavouring. It is not. Commercial bitter-almond and noyau flavourings are processed to remove the cyanogenic compounds; a whole raw kernel dropped into a pot is not.
- No sealing or storage stepThe recipe stops at the end of cooking. There is no direction to fill, seal or process jars, and no headspace, jar size or processing time, so it gives no basis for safe keeping. Preserving recipes of this period often left the sealing routine to the reader, which is not a safe assumption now.
- "Silver spoon" and the potato ricerSilver was generally specified because iron and tin utensils discoloured acid fruit; stainless steel has made the instruction obsolete. The potato ricer is doing the work of a food mill, though the recipe does not say what the pressing was for.
- "Equal amount of sugar"An equal quantity of sugar to fruit pulp was standard for a keeping marmalade, though the recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume, and the lemon supplies the acid for set. That ratio is sound.
- If you want peach marmaladeUse a current tested preserving recipe with measured jar processing times. Leave the kernels out entirely.
History: Cracking a few fruit stones into a preserve was ordinary practice in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchens: peach, apricot and cherry kernels all carry the same bitter-almond note, and the technique survives in commercial form in liqueurs such as noyau. The recipe's own opening shows the thrift at work — the choice halves went elsewhere and the less choice ones had to be turned into something that would keep. The toxicity of fruit kernels was known in the period, but the chemistry of amygdalin and the wide variability in kernel toxicity were not the common knowledge they are today.