Brandied Peaches

This is a spirit preserve of the old school: raw fruit, sugar, and enough alcohol to do the work that heat and a sealed jar do now. The book gives no weight of peaches and no final alcohol strength, and that is the problem with it.

• The ratio is open-endedSugar is given as half the weight of the peaches, but the peaches themselves are never weighed and the alcohol is fixed at one quart. A quart of spirit over three pounds of fruit and a quart over twelve are entirely different preserves, and only one of them is stable.
• Why that mattersAlcohol preserves fruit only if the finished liquid stays above roughly 18-20 percent by volume. Peaches are about ninety percent water, and that water leaches out into the jar over the first days. Without a measured fruit-to-spirit ratio there is no way to know whether the syrup lands above that line or well below it.
• "High-proof alcohol"The phrase in period recipes generally pointed to a much stronger spirit than a modern brandy, and such spirit is restricted or unavailable in many places now. Note that the recipe itself offers brandy as an alternative, but a 40 percent brandy diluted by peach juice changes the arithmetic entirely.
• The jar is not sealedA stone crock closed with a cloth under the cover is not an airtight seal in the modern sense, whatever the cloth was for, and nothing in the recipe is ever brought to temperature.
• No heat step at allThe fruit is packed raw and the jar is never processed. Preservation depends wholly on the spirit strength, which as written is unknown. Surface yeasts and molds are the usual failure, and a slack alcohol level in a low-oxygen sugar syrup is not a margin worth testing.
• If you want brandied peachesUse a current tested recipe from a canning authority that specifies fruit weight, syrup strength and either a water-bath process or refrigerated storage.