Home › The Principles of Cookery › Peaches, Brandied
Peaches, Brandied
Stew some very fine, ripe, well-flavoured peaches in a syrup of seven ounces of sugar to half a pint of water, turning them often. When tender, put them, with the syrup, into new jars or wide-mouthed glass bottles, leaving space on the top for brandy, which should be poured in when the fruit is quite cold. A few peach or apricot kernels may be blanched and added before the bottles are corked. Average cost of peaches, 3s. per dozen. (See also PEACHES PRESERVED IN BRANDY.)
This is a shelf-stable preserve built on two assumptions that no longer hold: that stone-fruit kernels are a harmless flavouring, and that a cork and a splash of spirit are enough to make a jar safe for months. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The kernels are the main problemPeach and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed or chewed kernel meets moisture and enzymes. A "few" blanched kernels steeping in syrup for months is an uncontrolled dose, and apricot kernels in particular are subject to consumption limits in several countries. Blanching does not remove the compound.
- No quantity of brandy is givenPreservation here depends entirely on the final alcohol strength in the jar, and the recipe never says how much spirit to add or what proof it should be. Poured over a large volume of sugar syrup, ordinary 40% brandy can easily end up diluted well below any level that inhibits spoilage.
- No processing, no sealThe fruit goes into jars warm, is topped with spirit when cold, and is simply corked. There is no heat processing, no measured acidification and no hermetic seal, so the method offers no evidence that the contents are safe after weeks at room temperature. A current, tested brandied-fruit or water-bath canning recipe should be used instead.
- "New jars or wide-mouthed bottles"The only closure named here is a cork, and the instruction to use new vessels most plausibly concerns clean glass rather than a tested seal. It is not equivalent to a modern two-piece lid, and reading it as such is a common error with old preserving recipes.
- The syrup ratio, for referenceSeven ounces of sugar to half a pint of water (an imperial half-pint is about 284 ml) works out at roughly 40 per cent sugar by weight, a moderate poaching syrup rather than a heavy preserving one. Enough to poach fruit and hold its shape, but not a sugar concentration that would preserve on its own.
- The costing dates the bookThree shillings a dozen for fine dessert peaches was a substantial price in Victorian Britain, where dessert peaches came from walled gardens, glasshouses or imports. The figure is a period price note, not a guide to anything you would pay now.
Brandied fruit sat at the point where the still-room met the dessert table: a way of carrying the short English peach season, largely a product of walled gardens and heated glasshouses, into the winter, and of putting something on the table that announced both a good garden and a good cellar. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery gathered thousands of such entries into alphabetical reference form, which is the format in which this entry ends by cross-referring to a second, differently worked method. The habit of adding blanched kernels came from the older confectioner's practice of using stone-fruit kernels wherever a bitter-almond note was wanted in ratafias, macaroons and creams, and it persisted long after chemists had identified the compound behind that flavour. Modern kitchens get the same aroma from almond extract, and leave the stones alone.