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Peach Jelly
Peel, divide, and stone a dozen ripe peaches, and boil them and the bruised kernels for a quarter of an hour, in a thin syrup, made of ten ounces of sugar and half a pint of water. Flavour the syrup with the grated rind and strained juice of four lemons, strain it through a jelly-bag, and add to it an ounce of dissolved isinglass or gelatine. Pour it into a mould, which should be set upon ice until the jelly is sufficiently stiff to turn out. The fruit from which this jelly is made may be served as a compote, with a little red currant-juice added to the syrup. Time, a quarter of an hour to simmer the fruit. Probable cost, 2s. a pint. Sufficient for a quart mould.
The failure here is not the jelly but the kernels. Everything else in the recipe is ordinary Victorian confectionery practice, but the flavouring step puts a cyanogenic glycoside into the syrup in an uncontrolled quantity.
- The bruised kernelsPeach stones contain amygdalin, the same compound that makes bitter almonds dangerous. Crushing the kernels brings the glycoside into contact with the enzyme that releases hydrogen cyanide, and the recipe gives no way to know how much may be extracted from twelve stones of unknown size and bitterness. A prolonged boil does deactivate that enzyme and drive off volatile cyanide, so what reaches the finished jelly is uncertain rather than demonstrably high.
- Why the dose cannot be judgedAmygdalin content varies widely between varieties and with ripeness, so nothing in the recipe lets the quantity be estimated. The quarter-hour boil would drive off much of any volatile cyanide, but a quart mould eaten by a few people concentrates whatever remains into a small number of servings.
- Not the same as a stone left inWhole, unbruised stones simmered briefly in a compote are a different proposition from kernels deliberately crushed to release their flavour. The recipe asks for the latter, which is the step that makes the quantity extracted impossible to judge.
- IsinglassIsinglass is prepared from the dried swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, once a standard setting agent and now largely a specialist brewing product. Cassell's offers gelatine as an alternative, which suggests the substitution was already accepted at the time of publication.
- Units, for reading the originalHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in imperial measure, roughly 1¼ US cups; ten ounces of sugar is about 1½ cups. "Probable cost, 2s. a pint" is a shilling-and-pence price of the 1870s-90s and has no useful modern equivalent.
- If you want peach jellyUse a current recipe. The lemon, syrup and gelatine framework here is sound, but the kernel infusion is not something to reproduce or to guess a safe quantity for.
Kernel flavouring was common in nineteenth-century sweet cookery: the almond-like note of peach, apricot and cherry stones is often said to have served as a domestic stand-in for expensive imported almonds, and it survives commercially in noyau and ratafia liqueurs and in the flavour profile of Italian amaretti, which rest on bitter almonds and apricot kernels as much as on peach. Cassell's places this among moulded jellies, the showpiece of the Victorian supper table, which depended on a reliable setting agent and on ice, both of which were becoming more widely available to middle-class households over the course of the century through commercial gelatine and the ice trade. The instruction to serve the strained-out fruit separately as a compote with redcurrant juice is characteristic of the book's economy: nothing bought is thrown away. The toxicity of stone-fruit kernels was in fact known to Victorian chemists, and bitter almond essence was a recognised poison in the period's medical literature, but the risk was understood as a matter of large doses rather than of the small culinary infusions that cookery writers went on recommending for decades.