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Spiced Peaches
3 pounds brown sugar 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon cayenne pepper Boil sugar and vinegar. and cook in syrup. Tie spices in bag and cook with peaches. When peaches are tender, pour into stone jars, reheat syrup every day for a week, pouring over peaches when boiling.
Scald peaches, remove skins, All kinds of small fruits may be spiced in this manner.
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle of the sort common in turn-of-the-century preserving chapters, and it cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the method and where it fails.
- Why it fails: no seal, no processingThe fruit is ladled hot into stone jars and the syrup is drained off, boiled and poured back each day for a week. Nothing is sterilised and nothing is sealed, and the recipe gives no instruction for covering the jars between reheatings. Mould and yeast growth on the surface, and spoilage below it, are ordinary outcomes; a current tested recipe for pickled or spiced peaches should be used instead.
- Why it fails: the acid is unquantifiedWhat keeps a spiced fruit safe is the finished acidity of the syrup, and here the vinegar has no measured amount at all against three pounds of sugar. Without a stated proportion there is no way to know whether the pack lands in a safe range or well outside it.
- The "repeated syrup" logicThe daily boil-and-pour worked mainly as a texture step. Drawing off syrup, concentrating it slightly by boiling and returning it hot draws sugar into the fruit gradually so the peaches plump rather than shrivel. Whatever heating it provided, it is not a substitute for sealing and processing.
- Stone jarsA stone jar is a salt-glazed stoneware crock, not a glass canning jar. It has no lid that seals and no way to hold a vacuum, which is precisely the problem with storing this pack any length of time.
- Cayenne in preserved fruitA trace of cayenne alongside ginger turns up in nineteenth-century spiced fruit recipes, used as background warmth rather than heat. The quantity here has lost its fraction in the text as printed.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less refined and more molasses-forward than most supermarket light brown sugar today. It is what gives spiced peaches of this era their dark syrup and slightly caramel edge.
- Scalding to skin peachesThe one technique here worth keeping in mind generally: ripe peaches slipped into boiling water for under a minute, then cooled, shed their skins cleanly. Left in longer, the outer flesh cooks and tears away with the skin.
- The spice bagThe recipe directs that the spices be tied in a bag rather than added loose, which keeps the syrup clearer and lets the spice be pulled once the flavour is where the cook wants it.
Spiced fruit belongs to the older tradition of sweet pickling, in which vinegar, sugar and warm spices preserved the late-summer glut and produced a sharp-sweet relish to cut rich winter meat. Peaches were the classic subject in American books, cloves stuck into each fruit or whole spices tied in a bag, and a jar of them was expected on the table beside ham, roast pork or cold fowl. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and it went well beyond the sponsor's product to cover the whole domestic year, preserving chapter included. The closing line -- that all kinds of small fruits may be spiced in this manner -- is characteristic of the era's writing for cooks: a single method was taught once and then applied to whatever the season brought, on the assumption that the reader already knew what tender fruit looked like and how a syrup should behave.