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NECTARINES, PRESERVED (another way)
Gather the nectarines when fully grown, but not over-ripe. Wipe them with a soft cloth, and put them into a pan of boiling water. Place them near the fire, but not upon it, as it is only necessary that the water should not be allowed to cool. Let the nectarines remain for an hour, then take them out, throw them at once into cold water, and leave them for another hour. Place them on an inverted sieve to drain. Push out the stones. Put the weight of the fruit in loaf sugar into a preserving-pan with a quarter of a pint of cold water to each pound of sugar. Boil to a clear syrup, then put in the nectarines, and the kernels, blanched and sliced, and let them boil for five minutes. Pour them carefully into a bowl, and let them remain for twenty-four hours. Drain off the syrup, and boil it for five minutes every day for a week, pouring it each time boiling hot over the fruit. At the end of that time boil all together quickly for ten minutes. Lift the nectarines carefully out with a spoon, and put them into jars with a portion of the blanched kernels in each jar. Add the boiling syrup, and when cold tie down securely. Store in a cool dry place.
Two things in this recipe put it outside modern practice: the deliberate inclusion of the stone kernels as an edible ingredient, and a week-long open-bowl preserving process finished with nothing but a tied cover.
- The kernels are the hinge, and the problemNectarine, peach and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted. Here the kernels are not merely steeped for flavour and removed; they are blanched, sliced, boiled into the syrup and then divided among the jars to be eaten with the fruit. How much cyanide a jar's worth would actually yield is not something that can be stated precisely, but blanching alone is not a reliable way of removing the glycoside, and kernels are not something to eat by the spoonful.
- Why bitter-almond flavourings replaced themVictorian cooks used kernels much as we now use almond extract. Bitter almond oil sold as a flavouring is required to be free from prussic acid, and the synthetic benzaldehyde used in modern extract gives the same taste without the cyanogenic compounds.
- The preserving method is not a processFruit is held a week at room temperature in a bowl, reheated each day only by having boiling syrup poured over it, then boiled together for ten minutes at the end before being jarred and "tied down". There is no jar sterilisation, no headspace, no proper seal and no measured processing time. High sugar concentration is the only preservative. Use a current preserving recipe with weighed sugar, sterilised jars and a timed water bath.
- Units, for reading the originalA quarter of a pint in an English book of this date is 5 fl oz, or about 142 ml, per pound of sugar. Loaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; granulated white sugar is its nearest modern equivalent. A "preserving-pan" is simply a wide, heavy pan, commonly copper or brass, with plenty of evaporation surface.
- What the long schedule was forBoiling the syrup and pouring it back daily draws water out of the fruit in stages so the flesh candies rather than collapsing. The technique itself is sound and survives in modern candied-fruit and whole-fruit preserve recipes; it is the absence of sealing and the kernels that make this version unusable.
Cassell's gives several nectarine preserves, and this is the whole-fruit version: the aim is a jar of intact, translucent fruit sitting in heavy syrup, closer to a candied conserve than to jam. The slow week of daily syrup-boiling belongs to a confectioner's tradition, and it is often said to have reached English domestic kitchens through French practice, where the same laddering of sugar concentration produces fruits confits. Nectarines and peaches were wall-trained, glasshouse or hothouse fruit in nineteenth-century Britain, ripening in a short glut, which is why so much space in books of this period goes to bottling, drying and preserving them. The instruction to blanch and add the kernels reflects a long-standing habit of treating stone-fruit kernels as a free almond substitute, a use also associated with ratafia, macaroons and flavoured creams. The hazard was not unknown: prussic acid in bitter almonds and laurel leaves was recognised well before the late nineteenth century, and cookery and household books of the period already carried warnings about laurel flavouring.