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Peach Preserves
Pare white freestone peaches, not quite ripe. Split in half, take out the stones, and throw the peaches in a bucket of water to prevent them from turning dark. Make a syrup of white sugar, using as many pounds of sugar as you have pounds of peaches. When it has boiled thick, put in as many peaches as will cover the bottom of the kettle. Let them boil till nearly done; then take them out, one by one, in a perforated spoon. Lay them in dishes and set in the sun. When all the peaches have been carried through this process, put back the first dish of peaches in the kettle, taking them out when a pretty amber color, and so on till all have been boiled twice. Meantime the peach-kernels should have been scalded and skinned. Put them in the boiling syrup, which must be kept on the fire till very thick. Put the peaches when cool in glass jars, and pour the syrup over them. In a few days examine, and if the syrup has become thin, boil again.--Mrs. S. T. Peach Preserves.
Pare, and add to a pound of peaches one and one-quarter pounds best sugar. Cook very fast for a few moments, in a porcelain kettle. Turn out in a bowl, cover with muslin or cambric, set in the sun, stirring every day till they seem quite transparent. They retain their flavor much better this way than when cooked on the fire. Put in jars, cover with paper saturated with brandy, and tie up tightly to exclude the air.--Mrs. P. W.
Two versions from two contributors, both built on the nineteenth-century practice of finishing fruit in open sunlight. Neither can be followed safely today, for reasons specific to what they ask you to do.
- The peach kernelsThe first recipe scalds, skins and boils the kernels from inside the stones into the syrup. Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted; they were used in the period as a cheap substitute for bitter almond flavouring, and bitter almonds themselves are for the same reason no longer sold unprocessed in the United States. There is no amount here that has been measured against a safe dose.
- Sun-curing in the openBoth recipes set fruit out uncovered or under a single layer of muslin for a day or several days. The syrup sits for hours in the range that supports mould, yeast and bacterial growth, exposed to insects and airborne spores, with no controlled temperature at any point. Modern preserving practice replaced this entirely with boiling-water processing for good reason.
- The second recipe barely cooksMrs. P. W. boils "a few moments" and then relies on sun and sugar alone. Sugar at 1 1/4 lb per pound of fruit is a genuine preservative, but the water activity of a sun-thickened preserve is not measurable in a home kitchen, and the recipe gives no gel point, no temperature and no test.
- Brandy paper is not a sealA disc of brandy-soaked paper tied over the jar mouth was standard before reliable screw bands and vacuum lids. It slows surface mould; it does not exclude air, and it does not create the sealed, processed environment that makes a shelf-stable preserve.
- No headspace, no processing, no jars as we know them"Glass jars" in 1879 meant whatever the household owned. Nothing in either recipe corresponds to filling, wiping the rim, sealing and processing, and the instruction "In a few days examine, and if the syrup has become thin, boil again" is an admission that these preserves were expected to be watched rather than trusted.
- If you want peach preservesUse a current tested recipe from a modern preserving authority, with weighed sugar, a measured gel point and boiling-water processing. Leave the kernels out.
- A note on the fruit"White freestone peaches, not quite ripe" is sound advice on its own terms: freestone halves cleanly, underripe fruit holds its shape and carries more pectin. The bucket of water is an acid-free anti-browning bath.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, is a book of household knowledge passed between women rather than a single author's system, which is why the same dish appears twice here in two hands. Sun-preserving of the kind Mrs. P. W. describes was widespread in the American South and around the Mediterranean before reliable canning, and it was genuinely valued for flavour: heat drives off the volatile aromatics that make a peach taste like a peach, and a long slow finish in the sun thickens the syrup by evaporation instead. The use of the kernel from inside the stone as a flavouring is equally old and equally widespread, from noyau liqueurs to Italian amaretti made with apricot kernels; the almond-like note is real, and so is the amygdalin that produces it. Commercial flavourings today are made from kernels that have been processed to remove the cyanogenic compounds, a step no nineteenth-century kitchen could perform.