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Peaches Preserved in Brandy
Gather the peaches when they are perfectly sound, but fully ripe. Make as much syrup as will cover them, boiling ten ounces of loaf sugar with every three-quarters of a pint of water until the sugar is dissolved. Pare the peaches, put them into the syrup, and simmer gently until they are so tender that a needle can be easily passed through them. As they reach this condition, lift them out one by one with a skimmer, and put them carefully into the jar intended for them, which they must only half fill. Pour the syrup over them, and to within two inches of the top, add a few of the blanched kernels, and when the syrup is cold fill up the jar with brandy. Cork closely, and cover the corks with bladder. It is well to examine the jars occasionally, and as the fruit absorbs the brandy to add more. If it should happen that the peaches are not quite ripe, pour boiling water over them, and keep them near the fire until the skin can be easily drawn off. Probable cost of peaches, 2d. to 6d. each.
This is a straightforward brandied-fruit preserve of the Victorian type, but one instruction puts it outside what we would make today, and a second raises a preservation question worth understanding.
- The kernels are the problemThe "blanched kernels" are the seeds from inside the peach stones, and like bitter almonds they contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or left to steep. Victorian cooks used them freely for their almond flavour; a few kernels infusing in spirit for months is exactly the extraction step that concentrates the compound, and the dose is entirely uncontrolled. A current recipe should be used if you want brandied peaches.
- Bladder as a sealDried pig's bladder, soaked soft and tied over the corked jar, was the standard airtight cover before rubber rings and screw bands. It shrank tight as it dried. Nothing in the modern kitchen behaves the same way, and the recipe gives no headspace or sterilisation guidance of any kind.
- Alcohol strength is not statedPreservation here depends on the finished liquid staying strong enough in alcohol to prevent spoilage, but the syrup and the brandy are combined by eye, to the top of the jar. Nineteenth-century brandy was also not standardised at 40% ABV. The recipe gives no measured ratio at all; it asks only that the jars be examined occasionally and more brandy added as the fruit absorbs it.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone, broken and crushed before use. Ten ounces is by weight, roughly 1 1/3 cups of granulated sugar, and the modern equivalent is plain white sugar; nothing is lost in the substitution.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 imperial fl oz, near enough 1 3/4 US cups. Cassell's is a British book throughout and its liquid measures should always be read as imperial.
- The needle testThe doneness cue is sound and still the best one for poached stone fruit: a needle or fine skewer should pass through without resistance but the fruit should not slump. Peaches go from firm to collapsed within a minute or two at a simmer, which is why the book has you lift them out singly as each one is ready rather than draining the pan.
- Cost note"2d. to 6d. each" is twopence to sixpence per peach in pre-decimal currency, a reminder that these were glasshouse or imported fruit in Britain and that a jar of them was a luxury item, not a way to use up a glut.
Fruit put down in sugar and spirit was the standard British answer to a short season before reliable home canning, and peaches in brandy sat at the expensive end of that tradition: in nineteenth-century England peaches came from walled gardens, glasshouses and later from France, and the price note in this entry makes their status plain. The addition of the stone kernels reflects a long-standing European taste for noyau, the bitter-almond flavour drawn from apricot, peach and cherry pits, which appears constantly in period recipes for ratafias, macaroons and cordials; cooks used it because it tasted like almond extract, and its chemistry was not understood in the way it is now. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, which descends from the firm's earlier Dictionary of Cookery and was reissued over many years, was an alphabetical household reference rather than a personal cookbook, and this entry ends not with any suggestion for serving but with instructions for examining the jars, a fallback for underripe fruit, and a note of probable cost.