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To Pickle Peaches
1 pound peaches. 1/2 pound sugar. 1 pint vinegar.
Mace, cloves, cinnamon; boil the ingredients every day, for six days, and pour over the peaches--Mrs. F. D. G.
A sweet-sour spiced fruit pickle built on the old cold-pack principle: the syrup is boiled and poured over raw fruit again and again, never with it. The proportions are given by weight for a small batch and scale up cleanly.
- The hinge: never boil the peachesOnly the vinegar, sugar and spices go back on the heat each day; the fruit sits in the crock and takes up the syrup as it cools. Simmering the peaches themselves collapses them into jam-like mush, which is exactly what the six-day routine is designed to avoid.
- Why six daysEach daily boiling drives off water and concentrates the syrup, so sugar enters the fruit gradually. Pushing the same concentration at the peaches in one go shrivels and toughens them; the slow gradient keeps them plump and translucent.
- Weights into cupsHalf a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 1/8 cups. A pint is 2 cups of vinegar. One pound of peaches is roughly three medium fruit -- a small batch; multiply everything for a useful quantity.
- VinegarNineteenth-century household cider vinegar varied in strength. Use commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity; wine or white vinegar works but reads sharper against the spice.
- Spices unmeasuredNo quantities are given for the mace, cloves and cinnamon. For this batch, about a teaspoon of whole cloves, a blade or two of mace and a two-inch cinnamon stick is in period range. Tie them in muslin so they can be lifted out after six days of reboiling, by which time clove in particular turns medicinal.
- Preparing the fruitFreestone peaches, peeled -- thirty seconds in boiling water and the skins slip. Clingstones are still worth using for their firmness, but expect to cut rather than halve them. A few cloves stuck into each peach is a common treatment in period pickled-peach receipts.
- StorageThe recipe stops at the sixth pouring and says nothing about sealing. Keep the finished pickle covered in the refrigerator and eat within a few weeks; for shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water canning procedure for pickled fruit rather than this text.
- ServingA condiment, not a dessert. Pickled peaches belong beside baked or country ham, cold roast pork, or game -- one or two halves per plate with a spoonful of the syrup.
Spiced and pickled fruit was a fixture of the Southern larder, and peaches were the obvious candidate in Virginia, where orchards produced far more than could be eaten fresh in the few weeks of the season. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered such receipts from a wide circle of contributors, which is why so many entries -- this one among them -- end in a set of initials rather than a name; the book reads as the collective practice of a network of households rather than a single author's kitchen. The vinegar-and-sugar pickle sits at the older end of preserving technique, predating reliable home canning and relying on acid and sugar concentration rather than on a sealed, processed jar. Its purpose on the table was to cut fat: the sweet-sour peach against salt-cured ham is one of the durable pairings of the region.