Home › The Peach and Apricot › Domestic Peach Brandy
Domestic Peach Brandy
Make with two gallons French brandy to one gallon well flavoured peaches, skinned and mashed. Add to this the pits from a peck of the fruit and let stand two months, when filter and bottle.
This is an infusion rather than a distillation, but the flavouring agent is the problem: peach pits are the kernel-bearing stones of a Prunus, and the quantity called for here is far outside anything a modern cook should attempt.
- The pits are the hazardPeach kernels contain amygdalin, which in the presence of water and the kernel's own enzymes breaks down into hydrogen cyanide and benzaldehyde. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous, and the breakdown that yields the almond-like flavour the recipe is after is the same one that yields the cyanide.
- A peck is a very large doseA peck of peaches is roughly 10 to 12 pounds, or something like four to five dozen fruit. Steeping that many stones for two months in two gallons of spirit produces an extract of unknown and unmeasurable strength, and the recipe gives no indication of whether the pits are whole or cracked, which changes the extraction rate enormously.
- Filtering does not remove itThe instruction to filter and bottle takes out solids only. Any amygdalin-derived compounds that have migrated into the spirit over two months stay in the finished liquid, and the sweet almond flavour gives no warning of concentration.
- Commercial noyau is not the same thingModern almond and stone-fruit liqueurs are made under controlled conditions with regulated limits on hydrocyanic acid content, or with benzaldehyde flavouring that carries none of the risk. Nothing about the domestic version replicates those controls.
- If you want peach-flavoured brandyWork from a current recipe that uses fruit flesh alone. The peaches, skinned and mashed, are harmless; it is only the stones that put this one out of reach.
"Domestic" here is doing real work: it marks this as the household imitation of an imported article. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the fashionable cordials were noyau and ratafia, the first built on the bitter-almond note of apricot, peach or cherry kernels, the second a broader class of fruit- and kernel-based cordials, and American and British housekeepers reproduced them by steeping stones in whatever spirit was to hand. True peach brandy, distilled from fermented fruit, was a serious commodity in the American South and mid-Atlantic before Prohibition; this recipe sidesteps the still entirely and simply borrows a French brandy as its base. The danger of kernels was not unknown at the time ruthquote nineteenth-century medical writing discusses hydrocyanic acid poisoning from laurel water and bitter almonds at some length — and yet quantities like a peck of pits appear in print without comment.