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Peaches to Pickle
Make a syrup with one quart vinegar and three pounds sugar; peel the peaches and put them in the vinegar, and let boil very little. Take out the fruit, and let the vinegar boil half an hour, adding cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.--Mrs. A. H.
A sweet vinegar pickle of the kind Virginia kitchens kept by the shelf-full to serve with ham. The recipe gives the syrup but not the fruit, so a few numbers have to be supplied.
- How many peachesThe recipe names no quantity of fruit. A quart of vinegar with three pounds of sugar will syrup somewhere in the region of 4 to 8 lb of peeled peaches, depending on how deeply you want them covered; period recipes of this type vary widely. Scale the syrup to the fruit you have.
- The vinegarUse cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is what most bottled vinegar is now. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied a great deal in strength, so the sharpness of the finished pickle was never quite predictable.
- "Let boil very little" is the hingeThe fruit goes into the syrup only long enough to heat through and lose its raw crispness, three to five minutes for firm peaches. Boiled longer they slump and the skins-off flesh shreds when you lift them out.
- PeelingDrop the peaches into boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds and into cold water, and the skins slip. Clingstones are usually recommended for pickling because they hold their shape; freestones are easier to halve but soften faster.
- The spicesCinnamon, cloves and allspice here are almost certainly whole spices rather than ground. Tie them in cheesecloth so they can be lifted out and so nothing clouds the syrup, and be sparing with cloves, which darken pale fruit quickly. Two or three sticks of cinnamon, a tablespoon of allspice and a teaspoon of cloves would suit this quantity.
- The half-hour boilReducing the spiced vinegar for 30 minutes thickens it and concentrates the flavour; how much volume you lose will depend on your pan and heat. Pour it over the fruit while hot.
- StorageThe recipe says nothing about how the pickle is to be kept; crocks or jars in a cool cellar were the ordinary period practice. Treated as a refrigerator pickle they will hold for several weeks; if you want them shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for sweet pickled peaches rather than simply sealing the hot jars.
- ServingOne peach per person alongside cured ham, roast pork or cold fowl. They improve after two or three weeks in the syrup.
Sweet pickled peaches were a fixture of Southern larders in the nineteenth century, and they exist for a reason: Virginia produced enormous quantities of peaches that ripened all at once and would not keep, and it also produced salt-cured ham, which wants something sharp and sweet beside it. Sugar-and-vinegar preserving of this kind descends from a much older European tradition of fruit pickles, but it flourished in the American South, where fruit was abundant and refrigeration was not. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from a large number of Virginia housewives and cooks, and this is a typical entry: signed only with initials, assuming the reader already knows how many peaches she has and what a pickling crock looks like, and specifying only the parts she might get wrong.