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Preserved Peaches
Cut the peaches in halves, then pare neatly.
Weigh the fruit, take as much sugar as fruit, or take three fourths as much, by weight. Take one fourth of the sugar and twice the measure of boiling water, let boil five minutes, draw to one side and let settle, then skim; in this syrup cook the prepared peaches, a few at a time, until all are cooked. Remove each piece with a skimmer to a plate as soon as it is tender.
When all are cooked, add the rest of the sugar to the syrup, let boil two or three minutes, and settle; skim, and if quite thick, use at once to reheat the peaches. If the syrup is too thin, let boil rapidly until thick, then in it reheat the peaches and store in glass jars. Sour cherries, plums, and soft pears may be cooked in the same way.
The syrup method here is sound cooking, but the closing words "store in glass jars" describe open-kettle canning, a practice that current food-safety guidance has abandoned. The notes below explain the terms and why the storage step fails.
- Why it fails: no processingHot fruit is ladled into jars and simply capped; nothing sterilises the headspace, the rim, or the underside of the lid, and the seal that forms as the jar cools is unreliable. Peaches are an acid fruit, so the usual outcome is mould and yeast spoilage rather than botulism, but jars sealed this way can also fail silently and ferment. Any batch intended for shelf storage should follow a current tested recipe with a measured water-bath process.
- Why it fails: sugar is not the safeguard hereSugar is not the safeguard here -- equal-weight sugar preserves work partly by binding water, but here only a quarter of the sugar is first boiled with twice its measure of water, and the fruit is stored as halves in syrup rather than boiled down to a jam consistency. Whether the finished syrup reaches a concentration that would make the preserve self-stable at room temperature is not something the recipe measures or guarantees.
- "Twice the measure" is ambiguousThe instruction is to take one fourth of the sugar and twice the measure of boiling water. Whether the author meant twice the volume of that quarter of sugar or twice its weight is not stated. The result is a thin starting syrup either way.
- PareTo peel with a knife. Halving raw peaches and paring them by hand costs a good deal of flesh; the usual modern approach is a brief dip in boiling water followed by cold water, after which the skins slip off ripe fruit.
- Draw to one side, settle, skimOn a range of this period this meant sliding the pan off the hottest part of the top so the boil subsided and the scum, impurities carried in the sugar, rose to be lifted off. On a gas or induction hob, simply cut the heat.
- Cooking a few at a timeThis is the one piece of technique worth keeping. Crowding drops the syrup temperature and the halves stew into shreds; lifting each piece out with a skimmer the moment it turns tender is what keeps the fruit in shape.
- The other fruits namedSour cherries, plums and soft pears are all suggested for the same treatment, and all behave differently in a syrup — stone fruit skins split, pears take far longer to become tender. None of them is safe to store by the open-kettle method either.
Preserving in a two-stage syrup — a weak one to cook the fruit gently, then the remaining sugar boiled in to thicken it — was standard practice in American and British household manuals through the nineteenth century, and it survives because it genuinely works: fruit dropped straight into heavy syrup shrivels and toughens, while a light syrup lets it cook through before the sugar draws out its water. What has changed is the last sentence. Home canning in this period relied on the screw-band glass jar (generally traced to John Landis Mason's 1858 patent) and on the assumption that boiling-hot contents in a hot jar would seal themselves; processing the filled jar in a boiling-water bath, and the measured times that go with it, only became standard advice as extension services and the USDA began testing and publishing schedules in the twentieth century. A book like this one sits on the near side of that shift, which is why its syrup instructions are still useful and its storage instructions are not.