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Pickled Apricots or Peaches
Place the fruit in brine for a week, then remove, wipe, and place in clean jar. Pour over them boiling vinegar (one gallon to eight pounds of fruit) in which has been boiled one-half ounce each of whole pepper, white mustard seed and cloves, and a fourth-ounce of sliced ginger. Add one teaspoon of salt. Let stand over night. Re-heat vinegar and again pour over fruit. Repeat; add fresh to the spiced vinegar to fill up jars in which fruit is packed.
This is a nineteenth-century open-jar pickle: fruit is salted, packed cold into jars, and repeatedly drenched with hot spiced vinegar with no heat processing and no measured seal. The notes below explain the terms and why the method cannot be recommended today; a current tested recipe for pickled peaches should be used instead.
- The brine is undefined"Place the fruit in brine for a week" gives neither salt concentration nor temperature, and the strength of a curing brine matters to its safety. A weak brine held at room temperature for seven days leaves the outcome -- fermentation, surface mould -- entirely to chance.
- Nothing is ever processedThe fruit is never heated. Hot vinegar poured over cold fruit in a jar three times raises the surface temperature briefly and does nothing to the interior of a whole apricot or peach. The jars are not boiled, and no seal is specified or tested.
- The acidity is not controlledNo vinegar strength is given, and nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength; it cannot be assumed to have matched the 5 percent acetic acid modern tested recipes are built on. Peaches and apricots are themselves acid fruits, but they carry a great deal of water to dilute the vinegar, and a sealed, oxygen-poor jar whose contents finish above pH 4.6 is the condition in which Clostridium botulinum can grow.
- "Add fresh to fill up jars"The recipe does not say whether the vinegar added at the end is heated; if it is not, it reintroduces whatever the reheating was meant to control, and either way it further dilutes an already uncertain acid level.
- The proportions, for readingOne gallon of vinegar to eight pounds of fruit is roughly two cups per pound. Half an ounce each of peppercorns, white mustard seed and cloves works out to somewhere between one and a half and two and a half tablespoons by volume, depending on the spice; a quarter-ounce of sliced ginger is a small piece, about a thumb joint. These tell you the intended flavour, not that the method is sound.
- White mustard seedThe pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed. Mustard does have some antimicrobial action, which may be part of why old pickle recipes lean on it so heavily, though it is nowhere near a substitute for measured acidity.
Pickled peaches were a fixture of the American table — often said to be so from the early nineteenth century onward — set out beside cold ham, roast pork or game the way a chutney or a spiced fruit relish might be now — sweet-sour fruit as a foil to fat and salt. The technique is older than the American context: whole spiced fruit steeped in vinegar is generally traced to the European habit of preserving in vinegar and honey, and the spice list here, pepper, cloves and ginger, is very close to what a seventeenth-century English receipt book would have called for. What dates this particular version is the repeated pour-over: before reliable glass canning jars and a settled understanding of processing times, the vinegar was reheated and the fruit drenched again on successive days. Whatever the reasoning behind it, the method stayed in print for decades, which is not the same as working reliably.