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Extracts of Peach and Nectarine
To each pint of blanched peach pits add one quart of deodorised spirits. For the nectarine use one pint of nectarine pits and one half pint bruised peach pits and pour on them a quart of best deodorised spirits. Let stand indefinitely.
PEACH OR APRICOT WINE No. I Use nearly matured fruit and mash well. To each eight pounds of pulp allow one quart of water. Let it come to a boil then squeeze out the juice and to each gallon add two pounds loaf sugar. Ferment as for other wines, bottling when clear.
PEACH OR APRICOT WINE No. 2 Crack the pits of eight pounds of peaches and place in the bottom of a tub. Slice the peaches into two gallons of rain water, adding five pounds of loaf sugar, and boil together, skimming till no scum rises. Strain, pouring upon the kernels, stirring, then covering till cold. Place in this a slice of toast dipped in strong yeast and let all ferment, straining then into a cask and adding a bottle of sweet grape wine. Let stand six months then add an ounce each of gum arabic and powdered chalk (dissolved in a little of the wine heated slowly), being careful not to stir up the lees. At the end of a week this may be bottled and in eight months is ready for use.
These are peach-kernel preparations, and the kernel is the problem. Every stage here — the extracts, and Wine No. 2 in particular — is built on drawing flavour out of cracked stone fruit pits, which is exactly the operation that liberates cyanide.
- Why the pits are the hingePeach, nectarine and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. When the kernel is crushed, bruised or cracked and wetted, its own enzyme (emulsin) splits the amygdalin and releases hydrogen cyanide. The almond-like perfume the recipe is chasing and the toxin are produced by the same reaction.
- The extracts concentrate itA pint of pits steeped indefinitely in a quart of neutral spirit is a long extraction with no real cooking step. Blanching may have knocked back some of the kernel's own enzyme, but the amygdalin itself remains, and alcohol will draw out the glycoside and its breakdown products and hold them. There is no way to judge the strength of the finished extract by taste, colour or smell.
- Wine No. 2 pours hot liquor onto cracked kernelsCracking the stones of eight pounds of peaches, then straining the boiled syrup over them and covering till cold, is a warm enzymatic infusion — close to ideal conditions for the reaction. The kernels then sit in the must through the whole ferment.
- Quantity is out of any reasonable rangeSome historic kernel flavourings called for only a few kernels to a bottle. A pint of pits, or the stones of eight pounds of fruit, is far beyond that, and the recipe gives no dose, no dilution and no guidance on how much of the finished liquid is a serving.
- "Deodorised spirits"This is period language for a neutral, flavourless high-proof spirit — the ancestor of what a modern label would call neutral grain spirit. It is not the hazard here; the kernels are.
- Chalk and gum arabicPowdered chalk (calcium carbonate) was added to deacidify the wine and gum arabic as a stabiliser and body agent. Both survive in modern winemaking in controlled, food-grade forms, but the recipe specifies neither purity nor measured acidity, so the addition is blind.
- Rain water and a toast dipped in yeastWine No. 2 ferments untreated collected rain water, started with a barm-soaked slice of toast rather than a characterised yeast, so neither the water nor the culture is of known composition. Aside from the kernels, this alone is an uncontrolled ferment by any current standard.
- What to do insteadIf you want a peach or apricot wine, or an almond-scented cordial, use a current recipe with measured quantities, a cultured yeast and a flavouring that does not depend on stone fruit kernels.
Kernel liqueurs are old and were once everywhere: noyau in France, ratafia across much of Europe, and the crème de noyaux still sold today, all of them exploiting the fact that the seed inside a peach, apricot or cherry stone tastes strongly of bitter almond. Cooks who could not easily get almonds, or who did not want to pay for them, treated the stone as a free by-product of the fruit — the same instinct that put a few cracked cherry pits in a jar of preserves or an apricot kernel in the jam. Extracts and wines belonged to the same household habit of carrying a summer crop through the winter, and both were made from what the paring board left behind. The toxicity of amygdalin was understood in the nineteenth century in a general way — bitter almond oil was already regulated in some places under poisons legislation — but books went on printing kernel infusions at quantities no one would publish now.