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Brandied Peaches
4 pounds sugar 2 cups brandy Cut peaches in halves, remove stones, and cook in sugar and water syrup five minutes; take out, remove skins, and cook again in syrup five minutes. Remove kettle from range, and let peaches stand in syrup over night. In morning reheat, pack peaches in jars, and fill jars with an equal quantity of syrup and brandy. Seal.
This is open-kettle canning with an incomplete ingredient list, and neither problem can be patched by adjusting a time or a temperature. The notes below explain what is missing and why the method is no longer used.
- The fruit is never listedThe recipe as printed gives 4 pounds of sugar and 2 cups of brandy but never says how many peaches, nor how much water goes into the syrup. In preserving, the ratio of sugar and acid to fruit is the whole point, and here it cannot be recovered from the text.
- Open-kettle sealing"Pack peaches in jars... Seal" means the jars are filled hot and closed with no processing in a boiling-water bath. The vacuum this produces is unreliable, and anything that lands in the jar or on the rim during packing is sealed in with the fruit. Mould and yeast spoilage in fruit put up this way was a recognised problem, and period preserving chapters commonly give directions for dealing with jars that have worked or fermented.
- The brandy is not doing the work you thinkFilling with equal parts syrup and brandy puts the finished liquid somewhere around 15 to 20 percent alcohol, and the fruit itself dilutes it further as it absorbs liquid. That is at or below the concentration usually cited as arresting microbial growth, so the preservation depends heavily on the seal, which is the part that is unsound.
- Second cooking, then an overnight standStanding overnight in syrup at room temperature is a plumping step, meant to draw sugar into the fruit gradually so it does not shrivel. It also means a kettle of sweet syrup and fruit sits for hours at room temperature before the jars are filled, which is not a step any current preserving guide permits.
- Jars of the period"Seal" in 1907 meant a glass lid held down by a wire bail over a rubber ring, or a zinc cap with a rubber gasket. These are not the two-piece lids sold today, and the sealing behavior is different enough that instructions written for one cannot be read across to the other.
- If you want brandied peachesUse a current tested recipe from a preserving authority, which will specify fruit weight, syrup strength, headspace and a processing time. Read this page as a record of how the job was once done.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and like a number of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the era it wrapped a full general household manual around the sponsor's product. That is why a chocolate company's book carries a preserving chapter at all: the volume was meant to be the only cookbook a kitchen needed. Brandied fruit itself belongs to a much older European tradition of putting up stone fruit in spirits. Peaches came in a short, overwhelming glut in late summer, and freestone varieties, widely grown by this date, halved and pitted easily, exactly as the recipe assumes.