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Sweet Pickled Dried Peaches
When fresh peaches are out of season, make peach pickle from the dried fruit. Soak the dried peaches over night and the next day the skins can easily be removed from the most of them. Pin together two half-peaches of equal size with cloves and bits of cinnamon. Place them in cans, with an occasional almond to suggest a peach kernel, and pour over them hot, sweet, spiced vinegar. Let them stand at least a week before using.
This is a sweet spiced fruit pickle assembled from rehydrated dried peaches, and as written it is a preserving procedure with no measurements and no processing at all. The notes below explain what is missing and why that matters.
- No acid ratio is givenThe whole safety of a vinegar pickle rests on the finished acidity of the liquid in the jar, and here the vinegar is simply described as "hot, sweet, spiced." Sugar, spice infusion and the water carried in by soaked fruit all dilute the vinegar, and nothing in the text controls how far. Current tested pickle recipes specify vinegar of a stated strength, often 5 percent acetic acid, in a stated ratio to sugar and water for exactly this reason.
- No processing stepFruit is packed into cans and hot liquid poured over, with no boiling-water bath and no stated time. That is an open-kettle fill, which was ordinary practice in books of this period and is no longer considered adequate to seal a jar or to destroy spoilage organisms in the headspace. Peaches and vinegar are both acid, so the likeliest outcome is mould and fermentation in a jar that never sealed properly; but because nothing in the text controls the finished acidity, the jar cannot be relied on to be acid enough to be safe at room temperature.
- "Cans" here means glass jarsIn preserving books of this period a "can" is a glass jar with a rubber ring and a clamped or screw top, not tinplate. It does not tell you anything about closure quality, which was a real variable then.
- The cloves are structuralThe instruction to pin two matched halves together with whole cloves and pieces of stick cinnamon is not decorative. The spices act as skewers so the reassembled halves read as a whole peach in the jar. It also means a lot of clove in contact with the fruit, and clove is aggressive; the flavour goes medicinal quickly.
- The almond, and the kernel it imitatesThe almond stands in for the peach kernel that would sit inside a whole fruit. Do not substitute the real thing. Peach kernels and bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide, and old recipes calling for them are not safe to follow.
- Soaking and skinningOvernight soaking is what makes the skins slip, and it is also what puts a large and unmeasured volume of water into the fruit. Any modern version has to account for that water in the acid calculation, which this recipe does not.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for spiced or pickled peaches from a reliable preserving authority, which will give vinegar strength, headspace and a processing time.
Sweet spiced fruit pickles, served in small quantities alongside roast meat and cold cuts, were a fixed part of the American table through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The trick of pinning two halves back together around an almond, so the jar shows what appears to be a whole clove-studded peach with its kernel, is a piece of frank kitchen theatre, and the habit of studding fruit with whole cloves for pickling is generally traced back to English spiced-fruit practice carried over well before this book was written. It also shows the era's economy of thinking about dried fruit, which was treated less as a snack than as a raw material to be brought back to life.