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Peach Jam, Cooked
Prepare as for Sauce, using a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit,. It should be very stiff when done. Place in jars with brandy on top and seal well.
A three-line recipe that assumes you have already read the peach sauce entry a few pages earlier. The proportions are the only real instruction here, so the rest is a matter of knowing what "very stiff" means and how to close the jars in a way that keeps.
- "Prepare as for Sauce"The sauce entry is not reproduced here, but a peach sauce of this kind would ordinarily mean peeled, stoned peaches cut up and cooked down with the sugar until soft, with little or no added water beyond what the fruit gives up. For jam you simply carry that cooking much further. Peel by blanching 30-60 seconds in boiling water and slipping the skins.
- Equal weights of sugarA pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is the classic full-sugar ratio, and it is doing preservative work, not just sweetening. Reducing it will give you a softer, more perishable product that behaves like a compote.
- What "very stiff" meansPeaches are low in pectin and only moderately acidic, so they set slowly and reluctantly. Cook to 220F (105C) on a thermometer, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Adding the juice of a lemon per two pounds of fruit helps both set and flavour.
- ScorchingOnce the mass thickens it catches almost instantly. Use a wide, heavy pan, keep a flat-edged wooden spoon on the bottom, and expect the last ten minutes to need constant attention.
- The brandy on topSpirit poured over the surface, or a round of paper soaked in brandy laid on the hot jam, was the nineteenth-century defence against surface mould in jars that were only tied down with paper or waxed. It is a mould inhibitor, not a seal.
- Sealing, as we do it nowLadle boiling hot into clean hot half-pint jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace, wipe the rims and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath. That, rather than the brandy, is what makes the jars shelf-stable; unprocessed jars belong in the refrigerator and should be eaten within a few weeks.
- YieldFour pounds of prepared peaches with four pounds of sugar gives several half-pint jars, the number depending on how far you reduce it.
Peach jam of this kind belongs to a long canning season, and peaches and apricots were often handled identically: blanched, stoned, and boiled down pound for pound. Equal weights of fruit and sugar was the standing rule before reliable home pectin and before jars with screw bands and rubber-sealed lids were universal, and the sugar was expected to do most of the preserving on its own. The brandy poured over the top is the older technique still hanging on in print: spirit-soaked paper laid directly on the jam surface was a standard household guard against mould, and may belong to the same tradition that gave us brandied fruits and rum-covered preserves. That the book bothers to specify "seal well" suggests it was written for readers who owned proper jars but had not yet given up their grandmothers' habits.