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Brandied Peaches
1 peck peaches Half their weight in sugar 1 quart high-proof alcohol or brandy Remove skins from peaches, and put alternate layers of peaches and sugar in a stone jar; then add alcohol. Cover closely, having a heavy piece of cloth under cover of jar.
A cold-pack alcohol preserve of the old kind, written for a household buying peaches by the peck at the height of the season. The quantities are workable but the wording assumes knowledge a modern cook no longer has, particularly about what "high-proof alcohol" meant.
- The hinge: alcohol strength"High-proof alcohol" in recipes of this period usually meant a near-neutral grain spirit rather than 80-proof drinking brandy, though this recipe explicitly allows either. The peaches will give up a great deal of juice, so the weaker the spirit the greater the risk the jar ferments rather than keeps; here the heavy dose of sugar is doing much of the preserving work alongside the alcohol.
- A peck of peachesA dry peck is a quarter bushel, about 12 to 14 lb of peaches, or roughly 40 to 50 medium fruit. Half their weight in sugar is therefore 6 to 7 lb.
- Scaling downThe ratio is what matters: 2 parts peaches to 1 part sugar by weight, with a quart of spirit to every 12 to 14 lb of fruit. Two pounds of peaches, one pound of sugar and about 5 fl oz of high-proof spirit fills a quart jar.
- Removing the skinsScore a cross in the base and dip the peaches in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, then into ice water; the skins slip off. The recipe asks only that the skins come off, though halved and stoned fruit packs more closely.
- The stone jar and the clothA glazed stoneware crock was standard; a wide-mouth glass jar does the same work and lets you see whether the sugar has dissolved. The heavy cloth under the cover seems to have served as a seal against the air, while presumably still letting a little gas past.
- What happens nextThe sugar dissolves slowly by osmosis over several weeks. Turn or gently swirl the jar every few days until no crystals remain at the bottom, and keep it somewhere cool and dark. Six weeks is a minimum; three months is better.
- Signs it has gone wrongBubbling, a pushed-up lid, cloudy ropiness or a cidery smell mean the alcohol was too dilute and yeasts have taken hold. Discard rather than try to rescue it.
- Yield and servingOn the scaling above, a full peck fills roughly 6 to 8 quart jars. In this section the fruit and its syrup are meant to be spooned over a plain steamed or boiled pudding, and it does the same work over ice cream, rice pudding or pound cake.
Putting fruit down in spirit and sugar is among the older forms of preserving that need no fire, and it survived into the twentieth century in cookbooks partly because it asked nothing of the stove during the hottest weeks of the year. The German Rumtopf, the French fruits à l'eau-de-vie and the American brandied peach share the same idea: sugar draws water out of the fruit, alcohol takes up what water is left, and between them little can grow. That this entry sits under Pudding Sauces rather than Preserves suggests how it was used, the same jar supplying both the fruit and the sauce for an otherwise plain boiled pudding. The peck itself is a market measure, a quarter of a bushel, a reminder that peaches were bought in bulk for a few days each summer.