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Pickled Peaches
3 pints (6 cups) sugar ½ peck peaches 1/2 pint (1 cup) vinegar ½ pint (1 cup) water A few cloves Do not pare the peaches, but wipe them carefully with a clean cloth. Divide them into three equal parts. The peaches should not be too ripe. Bring the vinegar, the sugar, and water to boiling point in an earthenware dish, then put in one-third of the peaches, and cook for twenty minutes; remove them to a platter, then put in another third of the peaches, till each part has cooked for twenty minutes.
Stick two cloves into each peach, put them into dry jars, cover with the boiling syrup, and seal at once. Plums Salt
A sweet vinegar pickle of the open-kettle type, written when a filled jar was assumed to seal itself. The quantities as printed do not balance, so read them before you shop.
- The peach quantity is almost certainly a misprintThe peach quantity looks like a misprint -- a peck of peaches runs about 12 lb, so 1½ pecks is some 18 lb of fruit, far more than 6 cups sugar and 1 cup vinegar will syrup. Half a peck (about 6 lb, 16 to 20 medium freestones) is nearer the amount this quantity of syrup will cover.
- A heavy syrup by designThe printed page gives ½ pint (1 cup) vinegar and ½ pint (1 cup) water against 3 pints (6 cups) sugar, and that is what our text now reads. The syrup is deliberately heavy, and it thins as the fruit gives up its juice.
- Earthenware means nonreactiveThe instruction is about chemistry, not charm. Vinegar and long-boiling fruit acid pit bare aluminum, cast iron and unlined copper, and pick up a metallic taste. Enameled cast iron or stainless steel serves the same purpose.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes is long by modern practice -- firm, barely ripe clingstones or freestones are usually given 5 to 10 minutes in simmering syrup, until a skewer slides in with slight resistance. Twenty minutes at a boil will overcook any but very firm fruit, which may be part of why the recipe insists the peaches not be too ripe.
- Skins on, and whyModern pickled-peach recipes generally blanch and slip the skins; leaving them on, as here, helps the fruit hold its shape but leaves a slightly fuzzy skin on the finished pickle. If you peel them, cut the cooking time further still.
- Cooking in thirds is deliberateCrowding the pan drops the syrup off the boil and steams the fruit unevenly. Work in batches even if your pot looks big enough, and let the syrup return to a full boil between them.
- "Seal at once" is obsoletePouring boiling syrup into dry jars and capping them — open-kettle canning — was standard practice for a century and is no longer considered a reliable seal. High-acid pickles of this kind are not a botulism risk, but the method invites mold and yeast spoilage under a false seal. Treat the batch as a refrigerator pickle, good for several weeks, or follow a current tested recipe for water-bath processing times.
- Cloves and yieldTwo cloves per peach is assertive; one per peach, plus a stick of cinnamon in the syrup, is closer to modern taste. Half a peck fills roughly four to five pint jars.
- ServingThese are a condiment, not dessert — one peach per person alongside ham, roast pork, cold cuts or curry, with a spoonful of the syrup.
Sweet vinegar pickles of whole fruit — peaches, pears, crabapples, plums, the last of which appears to head the next entry in this book — were a fixture of American preserving from the mid-nineteenth century through the Second World War, and pickled peaches in particular were a common accompaniment to baked ham and cold roast meats in the South and mid-Atlantic. The technique descends from European sweet-and-sour fruit preserves, adapted to a country with large late-summer peach crops and little refrigeration; sugar and vinegar together did the preserving work. Its appearance alongside the rest of this book's contents reflects how such volumes were often assembled: a core of the advertised subject padded out with a household's general repertoire of pickles, jellies and relishes.