Home › Canning and Preserving › Canned Peaches
Canned Peaches
8 quarts peaches. 3 quarts water 1 quart sugar Make a syrup of the sugar and water; bring to a boil; skim it and draw the kettle aside where the syrup will keep hot but not boil.
Pare the peaches, cutting them in half or not as desired. If in half leave one or two whole peaches for every jar, as the kernel improves the flavor. Put a layer of fruit in the kettle; when it begins to boil skim carefully; boil gently for ten minutes; put in jars and seal. Then cook more of the fruit in similar fashion. If the fruit is not fully ripe it may require a longer time to cook.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is ladled into jars and sealed with no further processing. It was standard practice for a century and is no longer considered safe for shelf-stable storage.
- No process step at allThe peaches boil ten minutes in the kettle, then go straight into jars and are sealed. Nothing heats the filled, closed jar, so the headspace, the jar rim and the underside of the lid are never brought to temperature and are never purged of air. Current guidance requires a measured boiling-water-bath process for peaches, timed by jar size and altitude.
- Seals formed by chanceAn open-kettle seal depends on residual heat pulling a partial vacuum as the jar cools. Many hold; a meaningful fraction do not, and a weak seal is not visible from outside. Spoilage by mold and yeast in high-sugar fruit is the usual result, and successive batches cooked in the same syrup carry whatever the ladle, funnel and jar rim carried.
- The kernelsThe instruction to leave whole peaches in each jar "as the kernel improves the flavor" works because peach pits contain amygdalin, which yields benzaldehyde — the almond note — and also hydrogen cyanide. Intact pits release very little; cracked pits are a different matter. There is no reason to build this into preserved fruit now.
- Unripe fruit, no time given"If the fruit is not fully ripe it may require a longer time" is the whole of the guidance. Firm peaches also resist the heat penetration a real process depends on, so under-processing compounds itself.
- Syrup strength, for referenceOne quart sugar to three quarts water is roughly a light syrup by modern classification. That part of the recipe is unobjectionable; the sugar is for flavor and texture and does nothing to make the pack safe.
- What to use insteadFollow a current tested procedure for canned peaches — a modern preserving manual or a university extension publication — which will specify hot or raw pack, headspace, jar size and process time. Do not adapt the timing above.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book belongs to a publishing fashion associated with the 1910s and 1920s: recipes issued as detachable leaves in a binder, so a household could add, discard and reorder pages as its own cooking changed. Its canning chapter reflects the open-kettle method that dominated American home preserving until the 1920s and 1930s, when state agricultural extension services and changes in jar and lid design pushed cooks toward timed boiling-water and pressure processing. The detail about leaving a whole peach or two per jar for the sake of the kernel is older still: the almond-like flavor of stone-fruit pits was deliberately exploited in European preserving and confectionery — the basis of noyau and of the ratafia flavoring in old cake recipes — long before the chemistry behind it was understood. It survives here as a piece of inherited kitchen practice, recorded at almost exactly the moment the science of canning was about to overtake it.