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Peach Marmalade
Boil twelve pounds soft peaches in a little water. When reduced to a pulp, run through a colander and boil again till very thick, constantly scraping from the bottom. Add half a pound sugar to one pound fruit. Cool in a bowl, and then put in glass jars with screw tops. Pear marmalade may be made by the same recipe, and also apple marmalade, except that you flavor the last with lemon juice and rind.--Mrs. S. T.
A plain long-boiled fruit butter in the old sense of "marmalade" — no pectin, no added acid, just fruit reduced until it holds. The ratio is the only measurement given, and everything else depends on watching the pot.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of peaches is an orchard batch and will take hours in a domestic pan. Three to four pounds of fruit with 1 1/2 to 2 lb sugar behaves the same way and reduces in a fraction of the time.
- The sugar ratioHalf a pound of sugar to one pound of fruit means 8 oz per 16 oz. The recipe does not say whether the fruit is weighed whole or after sieving; since the sugar goes in after the pulp is reduced, weighing the sieved pulp is the reading that follows most naturally. Either way it is around a 2:1 fruit-to-sugar preserve, less sweet than most modern jams and correspondingly less stable.
- Add sugar late, then watch itThe recipe boils the pulp thick before the sugar goes in, and it is at that stage that it calls for constantly scraping from the bottom; a thick sugared pulp will catch even more readily. Either way the scraping is the hinge of the recipe — a wide heavy pan, a flat-edged wooden spatula, and unbroken attention.
- "Soft peaches"The freestone/clingstone distinction matters less than ripeness; very ripe fruit is what the instruction points to. Skins and stones can go into the initial boil since everything passes through the colander, but stones are easier removed first.
- When it is doneThick enough is when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that does not immediately close, or about 220F on a thermometer. Undercooked, it will weep in the jar.
- Screw tops then and nowA screw-top glass jar of this period would typically have had a metal (often zinc) cap with a rubber ring, and such closures were generally expected to seal as hot contents cooled. Filling cooled preserve into cold jars, as written, leaves no seal at all and invites surface mould.
- Storing itTreat the finished marmalade as a refrigerator or freezer preserve, or process filled hot jars by current water-bath canning directions for peach jam. Do not rely on the sugar alone for pantry storage at this ratio.
- YieldRoughly five to seven pint jars from the full twelve pounds, depending how far the pulp is reduced.
- The pear and apple versionsBoth work. Apples carry considerably more natural pectin than peaches and will set sooner and firmer, so start testing earlier; pears, like peaches, are low in pectin and behave much as the original does. The lemon in the apple version is doing real work — it lifts an otherwise flat fruit.
"Marmalade" here carries its older, broader meaning: a thick fruit paste of any kind, from the Portuguese marmelada, quince paste, after marmelo, the quince. The narrowing of the word to bitter-orange preserve is largely a later British habit, and American cookbooks of the nineteenth century used it freely for peach, pear, quince and apple. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from many Virginia households and credited them by initials, as here with "Mrs. S. T." — which is why the book contains several overlapping versions of the same preserve. A recipe that begins with twelve pounds of soft peaches belongs to a household with its own trees and a short, urgent window when the crop came in all at once. Commercial powdered and liquid pectin did not reach home kitchens until the twentieth century, so setting a preserve meant long boiling and a great deal of stirring, and fruit butters like this one were the practical answer for fruit too ripe to can in halves.