Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
In addition, this page instructs boiling fruit in caustic lye and adding blanched peach kernels. Lye causes severe chemical burns and is dangerous to ingest, and peach kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Brandy Peaches
For twelve pounds large freestone Heath peaches, not quite ripe and delicately pared, make a syrup of four pounds sugar. Scald a few peaches at a time in the syrup, till all have gone through this process. Place on dishes to cool. Then put in glass jars and add enough good whiskey or brandy to the syrup to cover the peaches. Any spirit will do, if strong enough. Add a few blanched peach-kernels. In a few days see if more liquor or sugar is required. If so, drain off the syrup, add what is needed, and pour again over the fruit. It is a mistake to put too much sugar. Always use freestone peaches.--Mrs. S. T. Brandy Peaches.
Put the peaches (a few at a time) in boiling lye. Let them remain five minutes, to loosen the fur. Then take them out and wipe perfectly clean and white. Then drop them in cold water. Boil them gently in a rich syrup till a straw will pierce them. Then put in a jar, and mix equal parts of French brandy with the syrup. Carefully exclude the air.--Mrs. G. N.
Two contributors' methods printed under one heading, and both carry problems that cannot be fixed with a temperature or a timing. The notes below explain where each one fails.
- The peach kernelsPeach pits contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is broken up and its enzymes act on it, or through digestion. A few kernels steeped in spirit was a traditional flavouring on the same principle as bitter almonds, the sale of which for household use is now restricted in some places. The dose in a jar of fruit standing for weeks cannot be gauged at home.
- Boiling lye on fruitMrs. G. N.'s method uses lye to strip the peach fuzz. Commercial lye peeling exists, but it is done at controlled concentration, contact time and temperature, with a measured acid rinse and testing afterwards. The recipe gives none of that: no strength of solution, no neutralising step, only "wipe perfectly clean." Residual caustic on food causes chemical burns to the mouth and oesophagus.
- "Carefully exclude the air"Neither version specifies a jar, a seal, a processing time or a finished alcohol strength. The syrup-and-spirit mixture may or may not end up strong enough to be self-preserving, and there is no way to know from the text. Preserving fruit at home today calls for a current tested recipe with measured quantities.
- Freestone and clingstoneWorth noting as a point of confusion in the original: the Heath peach is best known as a late-season clingstone, yet Mrs. S. T. insists on freestones. The instruction and the variety name appear to be at odds in print.
- "Till a straw will pierce them"The old doneness test for preserved fruit: a broom straw or wheat straw slides through the flesh without resistance. It marks the point where the fruit has taken up syrup but has not begun to collapse, and it is a better guide than any clock, since it depends entirely on ripeness.
- ScaleTwelve pounds of peaches to four pounds of sugar is a large batch by modern standards, filling something on the order of five or six quart jars. Mrs. S. T.'s warning that "it is a mistake to put too much sugar" reflects a taste for brandied fruit that reads as fruit rather than as candy.
Brandied peaches were a standard of the Virginia storeroom, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled friends and relations, prints two versions side by side. The Heath peach named here was a celebrated late white-fleshed variety of the nineteenth-century South, prized for preserving because it held its shape in syrup. Putting up fruit in spirit was one way to deal with a crop that ripened all at once and rotted within days: the sugar drew out water, the alcohol did the rest. The lye dip in the second recipe was a common domestic shortcut for skinning peaches, plums and hominy alike, and it shows how casually households handled a caustic that is now confined to controlled industrial use.