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Canned Peaches
Scald sound, firm freestone peaches, a small number at a time, in boiling water just long enough to loosen skins; dip them quickly into cold water and slip off skins. Cut peaches in halves, and remove stones. Have ready a syrup made by boiling sugar and water together until sugar has dissolved, using 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar to each cup water. Allow about 1 cup syrup for each quart jar of peaches. Put in 1 cracked peach pit for every quart of syrup. Can-cooked Method.--Pack peaches in overlapping layers with rounded side uppermost and blossom end facing glass. Fill each jar with hot syrup and adjust rubber, cover, and upper clamp, thus partly sealing jar. Place jars on a rack in hot water that covers the tops to a depth of 1 inch. Bring water to boiling point, and boil pint jars for 16 minutes, quart jars for 20 minutes. Remove jars, seal, and invert to cool.
Open-kettle Method.--Cook peaches in syrup until tender; then with sterilized spoon slip them carefully into sterilized jar; fill jar to overflowing with syrup. Adjust rubber, cover, seal immediately, and invert to cool.
This is a 1920s-era canning procedure, and canning is the one area of old cookery where the science has moved decisively. The fruit itself is unobjectionable; the sealing and processing methods are not.
- The open-kettle method is obsoleteLadling hot fruit into a sterilized jar and sealing without any processing in the canner relies on the jar's own heat to sterilize the headspace and lid seal. It does not reliably do so, and mold and yeast spoilage in stored jars is the common result. Current guidance abandoned open-kettle canning for fruit decades ago.
- Inverting jars to coolTurning sealed jars upside down was once believed to sterilize the lid and confirm the seal. It instead disturbs the forming vacuum and can pull food particles into the sealing surface, producing seals that fail weeks later. Jars are now left upright and undisturbed.
- Processing times are short by current standardsSixteen and twenty minutes are shorter than modern boiling-water tables for halved peaches, which also lengthen with elevation; this recipe gives no altitude adjustment at all. Use a current tested recipe rather than scaling these numbers.
- The cracked peach pitPeach kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when broken and wetted. One cracked pit per quart of syrup was a flavoring trick — it gives a faint almond note — and the dose is small, but there is no reason to add a cyanogenic seed to preserved fruit deliberately.
- Rubbers, clamps and upper clampThis describes a glass-lidded bail jar with a separate rubber gasket ring, partly sealed by fastening only the top bail. Old rubbers perish, and this style of closure is no longer recommended for boiling-water processing; two-piece lids with a fresh flat lid each time are the current fitting.
- Water covering the tops by an inchThat part is still correct practice — jars must be submerged with an inch or two of water above them for the whole boil, topped up as it evaporates.
- The syrup ratioHalf to three-quarters cup sugar per cup of water is a medium to heavy syrup by modern naming, and one cup of syrup per quart jar is on the low side; expect nearer a cup and a half. Sugar in canned fruit is for texture and color, not preservation.
- Freestone versus clingstoneThe instruction to use freestone peaches still matters. Clingstones will not release the pit cleanly and you will tear the halves apart getting them out.
Home canning of peaches expanded enormously in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when cheap Mason-type and bail-top jars, reliable commercial sugar, and railroad-shipped orchard fruit converged in ordinary kitchens; wartime food-conservation campaigns in 1917 and 1918 pushed the practice further still, and cookbooks of the following decade often carry a preserving chapter laid out like this one, with rival methods set side by side. The two named methods represent a transition in progress: open-kettle was the older domestic habit, while "can-cooked" — processing the filled jar in boiling water — was the method that state agricultural extension services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture were actively promoting, and which eventually displaced it. The instruction to pack halves rounded side up with the blossom end to the glass is pure display logic, a jar of peaches being judged on the evenness of its rows as much as on its keeping.