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Vinegar (Tablespoonfuls candied)
4 tablespoonfuls candied or preserved ginger, chopped Large, white, freestone peaches are needed for this pickle. Do not remove the skins.
Cut out a piece large enough to take out the stone; cut on three sides down to the stone but if possible do not disturb the skin on the further side, in removing the stone. Put the flesh back in place, dispose the peaches in large bowl or porcelained dish, pour over them boiling salted water (a tablespoonful of salt to three pints of water), cover, and let stand over night.
Remove to fresh cold water and let remain about ten minutes; wipe dry. Pour boiling water over the mustard seed, add one fourth a teaspoonful of salt and let stand ten minutes; drain and mix with the horseradish, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves; use this to fill the open space in the peaches; run a needle with thread through the two parts of the peach and tie the thread to keep the peach whole. Set the peaches in a stoneware jar close together.
Make a syrup of one pint of sugar to three pints of vinegar and pour boiling hot over the peaches.
This is a stuffed pickled peach of the open-crock school: whole fruit brined overnight, packed with spice, and covered once with hot sweetened vinegar. The method belongs to a period before tested processing times, and it cannot be followed safely today.
- No processing, no sealThe peaches go into a stoneware jar and receive a single pour of boiling syrup; nothing is sealed, nothing is boiled in the jar, and no storage temperature is given. Nothing in the procedure brings the interior of a whole stuffed peach anywhere near a temperature that would make it shelf-stable, and an open crock left at room temperature is an invitation to mould and yeast growth on the surface.
- Vinegar strength is unstatedAcidity is the main thing preserving this pickle, yet the recipe names no strength. Vinegar was not sold to a standard household strength in this period, and cider vinegar sold today may be 4 percent rather than the 5 percent that modern tested pickle recipes require. With a pint of sugar and a great deal of watery fruit added to three pints of vinegar, the acidity of the finished pickle is simply unknown.
- The fruit is never cookedThe peaches are brined, rinsed, wiped, stuffed and packed raw. Hot liquid poured over close-packed whole fruit cools quickly and penetrates the flesh slowly, so the centre of each peach sits warm and unacidified for hours -- the condition under which spoilage organisms multiply fastest.
- Overnight in salted water at room temperatureA tablespoonful of salt to three pints of water is a very weak brine, well below the concentration that suppresses bacterial growth, and the fruit stands in it uncovered by refrigeration all night.
- The stuffing adds low-acid materialHorseradish, mustard seed and candied ginger packed into a cavity stitched closed inside the fruit are slow to be reached by the surrounding vinegar. Pockets of low-acid material inside an under-acidified whole fruit are what tested canning procedures are designed to guard against.
- If you want stuffed pickled peachesUse a current recipe from a tested source, with a specified vinegar strength and a boiling-water processing time for the jar size. Do not adapt the quantities above.
Spiced and stuffed peaches were a fixture of American preserving from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The stuffing here -- mustard seed scalded to take off its bitterness, horseradish, candied ginger, cinnamon and cloves -- is the standard sweet-pickle spicing of the era, closer to a chutney or a mostarda than to anything served as dessert, and such peaches were put on the table beside cold ham, tongue or roast pork. The instruction to leave the skin intact on the far side and stitch the fruit closed with a needle and thread is characteristic of the period's preserving books, which assumed a cook with time and patience and a stoneware crock in a cool cellar. Home canning science, with tested acidity levels and measured processing times, only reached ordinary kitchens through agricultural extension work in the decades after this style of recipe was written, and it superseded the open-crock method entirely.