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Peach Butter
4 pounds peaches 2 pounds sugar Select ripe peaches and peel and stone them before weighing. Cut them in pieces and put them through a fruit press. Put over the fire in a porcelain kettle and cook slowly until of the consistency of marmalade, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Add the sugar; stir until dissolved; cook rapidly for fifteen minutes, then place the kettle on the back part of the stove and keep warm until the butter is of the desired consistency. Pack in jars or tumblers.
A straightforward two-ingredient fruit butter, but the original assumes a wood or coal range with hot and cool zones and says nothing about sealing the jars. Both need translating.
- The hinge: sugar goes in lateThe peach pulp is reduced to marmalade thickness before the sugar is added. Sugar in from the start makes the mixture scorch on the bottom long before the fruit has given up its water, and no amount of stirring will save the burnt taste.
- Weigh after peelingThe 4 pounds is peeled, pitted flesh, so start with roughly 5 to 5 1/2 pounds of whole peaches. Loosen the skins by dipping the fruit in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds and then into cold.
- "Fruit press"A conical sieve or food mill; a food mill with the medium plate gives close to the texture intended. A blender or immersion blender works, though it aerates the pulp and lightens the colour.
- "Porcelain kettle"An enamelled cast-iron or stainless pan, not bare cast iron or aluminium, both of which react with the fruit acid and dull the flavour and colour. Use the widest pan you have; evaporation is the whole job here.
- "The back part of the stove"On a range, that was the cool end used for holding things warm. Translate it as the lowest setting on your smallest burner, stirring often, until a spoonful mounded on a cold plate holds its shape without a rim of syrup.
- Sealing is left outThe book's "pack in jars or tumblers" reflects the old habit of covering preserves with paper or melted paraffin. That is no longer considered a seal. Either refrigerate the butter and use it within a few weeks, or follow current tested boiling-water-bath directions for fruit butters.
- YieldYield depends on how far you reduce it. Fill hot jars with hot butter, leaving headspace.
- SpatteringThick fruit purée spits as it thickens. A splatter screen and a long-handled wooden spoon are worth having; stir right into the corners of the pan, where it catches first.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of the preserving shelf: pulp cooked down until its own pectin and evaporated water do the setting, with far less sugar than a jelly or a jam of the same weight of fruit. Apple butter is the famous American example, a Pennsylvania German tradition cooked outdoors in copper kettles, but peach, pear and quince butters appear alongside it in many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canning chapters, since a bushel of soft, ripe, bruise-prone peaches had to be dealt with in a matter of days. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with its detachable pages, may well have suited this kind of seasonal work, when a cook wanted one sheet propped up on the range and the rest of the book out of the way.