Sweet Pickled Peaches

What survives here is the proportion list for an old-style sweet spiced peach: fruit, brown sugar, vinegar and stick cinnamon in roughly the ratios used across nineteenth-century preserving books. The quantities are workable; the preserving procedure that governs whether the jars are safe is not present, so this belongs on the page as a historical record rather than as a working method.

• Why not as writtenA shelf-stable sweet pickle depends on a known acid level and a measured heat process — a boiling-water bath of a stated length for a stated jar size. Neither the acidity of the finished syrup nor any processing step can be determined from this text, so there is no way to know the jars are safe. Use a current tested recipe for pickled peaches instead.
• Vinegar is the unknownNineteenth-century household vinegar was cider or wine vinegar of unstated and inconsistent strength, which may have fallen below the 5 percent acetic acid that modern preserving assumes. Two pounds of sugar and a pint of such vinegar spread over several pounds of peaches is not a proportion you can verify by taste.
• Half a peckA peck is a quarter bushel; for peaches that runs about 12 lb, so half a peck is roughly 6 lb of fruit, or a dozen and a half to two dozen medium freestones.
• Brown sugar then and nowThe brown sugar of the period was a coarse, moist, partly refined sugar closer to today's muscovado than to the light brown sugar sold in boxes. It carried more molasses flavour and colour into the syrup.
• Stick cinnamon by weightAn ounce of stick cinnamon is a substantial amount — roughly eight to twelve three-inch quills. Sticks rather than ground spice were commonly specified for pickles because ground bark clouds the syrup and settles as grit.
• Cloves and clove-stuck fruitMany companion recipes of the era stud each peeled peach with whole cloves before it goes into the syrup. Their absence here is worth noting when comparing this entry with others in the same family.