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Peach Marmalade (Pare and stone the peaches)
Pare and stone the peaches, cutting the pulp in small pieces. Add a few of the kernels from the stones and let cook until soft; add an equal weight of sugar and stir occasionally while cooking, about fifteen minutes. Marmalade is often made of imperfect shapes of halved fruit, left over when putting up canned or preserved peaches. Quince Marmalade No. I Use pieces of quince not perfect enough in shape to put up as preserves. Cut the fruit in small pieces. Weigh or measure and take the same quantity of sugar. Set the fruit over the fire with just enough boiling water to cover and boil until tender; skim from the liquid. Add the sugar to the liquid, skim when boiling, then drop in the pieces of cooked quince and let boil about fifteen minutes, or until the syrup is jellylike when tested on a cold saucer. Store in glasses.
Quince Marmalade No. 2 Cook the skins of the quinces in boiling water nearly an hour, drain, and pour over the quinces prepared for marmalade, let cook until the quinces are very tender, then press through a porcelain colander or a fine sieve if preferred.
Measure and allow three fourths a cup of sugar to each cup of juice. Let the quince cook twenty minutes, stirring often, then add the sugar made hot in the oven and let cook till thick, stirring constantly.
Orange Marmalade without Peel Pull the peeling (colored and white) from six oranges and three lemons; cut the fruit in thin slices, discarding the seeds; chop the peel rather coarse. Tie the peel loosely in a piece of new cheesecloth. Weigh the peel and pulp.
Take three pints of cold water for each pound of material. Let the prepared orange and lemon stand over night in the cold water, then cook until the peel is tender. Let cool over night. Take out the peel and gently press all the liquid from it. Measure and take a cup of sugar for each cup of material. Heat the orange to the boiling point, add the sugar, and let boil till the liquid drops in beads from the spoon.
Store in glasses. The liquid pressed from the peel is added to the pulp and water.
Four preserving recipes run together here, all from the era when marmalade meant any thick fruit-and-sugar mass, not just citrus. One instruction in the peach recipe should not be followed, and the storage method throughout falls short of current practice.
- The peach kernelsThe kernels inside peach stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or steeped in a wet, warm medium. They were added historically for their bitter-almond perfume, from the same amygdalin breakdown that made bitter almonds a flavouring. The recipe specifies only "a few," so the yield in any given batch is unknown and unmeasured; the safe course is to discard the stones entirely.
- Open-kettle storage"Store in glasses" means ladling hot preserve into tumblers and sealing with paraffin or paper. That was standard practice for a century and it is the reason so much old jam grew mould under the wax. Current guidance is a boiling-water bath in proper jars for a stated time; consult a tested modern procedure rather than adapting this one.
- Equal weight of sugarPeach and quince marmalade both take sugar equal to the weight or measure of prepared fruit, a one-to-one ratio that does much of the preserving work. Quince Marmalade No. 2 drops to three quarters of a cup of sugar per cup of pulp, and is cooked until genuinely thick rather than merely set.
- Testing the setThe cold-saucer test named in Quince No. 1 is a reliable check without a thermometer: a spoonful on a chilled plate should wrinkle when pushed. The "drops in beads from the spoon" in the orange recipe is a different test for roughly the same stage, conventionally put at about 220F at sea level.
- Warming the sugarSugar "made hot in the oven" was warmed on a tray at low heat so it would not check the boil when added. The book gives no temperature. Warmed sugar dissolves more readily, though this recipe still directs constant stirring.
- Quince skins and pectinThe hour-long boil of quince peel in No. 2 works as a pectin extraction as much as a thrift measure. Quince cores and skins are among the richest domestic sources of pectin, which is why quince sets so hard and why the peel water is poured back over the fruit.
- Porcelain colanderThe specification of porcelain reflects the period preference for non-reactive vessels, bare iron and copper being thought to discolour acid fruit. Any stainless or nylon sieve does the job now.
- The orange marmalade's overnight soaksNeither stand is idle time. The first softens the pulp and starts drawing pectin from the peel bag; the second, which follows the cooking, lets the mixture cool so the peel can be pressed dry without scalding.
Marmalade in an American cookbook of this period still carried its older, broader sense: from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff paste of quinces (marmelo), which is why the quince recipes sit here alongside the orange one rather than being treated as something separate. The framing of both the peach and the first quince recipe is telling — they are made from the misshapen pieces left over when the good halves have gone into jars as canned or preserved fruit. Household preserving was graded work: whole, matched fruit for display on the shelf, trimmings and windfalls cooked down into marmalade and butter. The peach kernel, added for its almond scent, persisted in print long after its chemistry was understood.