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Pickled Peaches
2 pounds brown sugar 2 cups vinegar 1 ounce stick cinnamon 1/2 ounce whole cloves 4 quarts peaches Boil sugar, vinegar, cinnamon and cloves for 20 minutes. Dip peaches quickly in hot water; then rub off the fuzz with a cloth. Place a few peaches at a time in the syrup and cook until tender. Pack them into sterilized jars. Adjust the sterilized rubbers, and fill each jar to overflowing with hot syrup which has been strained. Put on sterilized covers and seal jars immediately.
A straightforward sweet-sour fruit pickle from the era of glass-topped jars and rubber rings. The ingredients translate easily; the sealing method does not.
- The sealing method is obsoletePacking hot fruit and syrup into jars and sealing at once — open-kettle canning — is no longer considered a safe way to put up preserves, because nothing kills what lands on the food between kettle and lid and the seal formed is unreliable. Use a current tested pickled-peach procedure for the filling and processing step; the syrup and spicing below are sound.
- "Sterilized rubbers" and coversThese are the rubber gaskets used with zinc caps or glass-lidded wire-bail jars. Modern two-piece lids have the sealing compound built in and are not boiled — flat lids are simply washed and warmed.
- Spice weightsHalf an ounce of whole cloves is about 2 tablespoons; an ounce of stick cinnamon is a good handful of 3-inch sticks and is best weighed rather than counted. Both are strained out at the end, so tie them in cheesecloth to save the straining.
- VinegarPeriod vinegar varied; buy cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it. The ratio here is 2 cups vinegar to 2 pounds sugar, which gives a distinctly sweet pickle rather than a sharp one.
- Four quarts of peachesMeasured as whole fruit in a dry quart measure, this is about 6 pounds — roughly 16 to 20 medium peaches. Clingstones were commonly used for whole pickled peaches because they hold their shape.
- PeelingThe recipe's quick dip in hot water is to loosen the fuzz, which is then rubbed off with a cloth; the skins stay on. If you would rather peel, thirty to sixty seconds in boiling water and straight into ice water slips the skins cleanly and stops the flesh softening at the surface.
- "Cook until tender"Five minutes in simmering syrup is usually enough for peeled halves or small whole fruit. Taken to genuine softness in the kettle they collapse in the jar, and the fruit continues to soften during processing and storage.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 pints. The syrup is generous; any surplus keeps refrigerated and is good over ham or in a vinaigrette.
Spiced and pickled peaches belong to the American sweet-sour table tradition — the relishes, chow-chows and pickled fruits set out alongside ham, roast pork and cold poultry, and often associated with Pennsylvania German cookery, though the familiar "seven sweets and seven sours" formula is a later popular coinage rather than documented household practice. Whole peaches stuck with cloves and simmered in sugared vinegar appear in printed American cookery well before the mid-nineteenth century, and became a fixture of late-summer canning once cheap glass jars with rubber-ring seals made home preserving practical for ordinary households. The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional volumes issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and its preserving chapter reflects standard early-twentieth-century home practice: open-kettle filling, boiled rubbers, and a trust in a hot pack that later research in food safety overturned.