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Plain Preserved Peaches
Prepare as Brandied Peaches, omitting the brandy. Light brown sugar is often used for a change in flavor. Crack a few peach stones and add the meats to the peaches in the jars.
Gooseberries, Preserved Whole Make a syrup of two pounds (four cups) of sugar and two cups of water, washing down as in making fondant. Prick each gooseberry in three or four places (after removing the stem and ends of calyx) and add two pounds of the berries to the syrup; let heat to 160° F. (212° is boiling point). Remove from the fire and let stand over night. Repeat this heating to 160° twice. The fourth day reheat to just below the boiling point and then let stand over night again.
Fill the jars with the cold fruit and syrup; set the jars in a steam cooker and let the water around them heat gradually to the boiling point; should the berries show signs of bursting, remove at once and seal; otherwise do not seal until the water boils.
Two preserves run together on one page, and both fail modern safety practice for different reasons. The notes below explain why rather than offering substitute times and temperatures.
- Peach kernels are the first problemThe "meats" inside cracked peach stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or steeped in a wet medium. Older cookbooks treated them as a cheap almond flavouring; the dose in a jar of preserves is unmeasured and unpredictable, and no modern preserving authority sanctions the practice.
- The recipe is incomplete on its faceIt begins "Prepare as Brandied Peaches," a recipe printed elsewhere in the book. Nothing here tells you sugar quantity, syrup strength, peeling method or processing time for the peaches themselves.
- The gooseberry method holds fruit in the danger zoneThe gooseberry method leaves fruit standing at room temperature for days -- Heating to 160°F and then letting the pan stand overnight, three or four times running, is a slow-plumping technique meant to keep berries whole. The heavy syrup and the acidity of the fruit work against spoilage, but the fruit is nonetheless held unsealed at room temperature across four days.
- "Do not seal until the water boils" is not a processFilling jars with cold fruit and syrup and warming them in a steam cooker until the surrounding water boils is open-kettle-adjacent practice. There is no specified processing time at a specified temperature, so nothing here can be verified as sterilising the jar contents or producing a reliable vacuum seal.
- Temperature reference in the originalThe parenthetical "212° is boiling point" is Fahrenheit at sea level, and boiling point drops roughly 1°F per 500 feet of elevation.
- "Washing down as in making fondant"This means brushing the inside of the pan above the syrup with a wet pastry brush to dissolve stray sugar crystals, which would otherwise seed the whole batch into graininess. It is sound technique and the one genuinely useful instruction on the page.
- If you want to put up peaches or gooseberriesUse a current tested recipe with a stated headspace and a stated boiling-water-bath time for your jar size and altitude.
Cracking a few stones into the jar is often described as a nineteenth-century economy: the kernel of a peach, apricot or cherry carries the same bitter-almond note as noyau and ratafia. The practice ran on right through the early canning manuals, well after chemists had identified the cyanogenic glycoside responsible, and it is one of the clearest markers of how much preserving advice predates any regulatory food-safety framework. The gooseberry method belongs to a different tradition u the slow, repeated low-temperature soak used across Europe to keep thin-skinned fruit whole in syrup rather than collapsing it into jam. Gooseberries were a common kitchen-garden crop in American and British households of the period; cultivation and movement of the plants were later restricted in parts of the United States because Ribes species host white pine blister rust, which is part of why the berry is far less familiar on this side of the Atlantic now than it was when this book was written.