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Cloves
Boil sugar, vinegar, and cinnamon twenty minutes. Dip peaches quickly in hot water, then rub off the fur with a towel. Stick each peach with four cloves. Put into syrup, and cook until soft, using one-half peaches at a time.
This is the working half of a spiced-peach recipe: the ingredient proportions sat in a list above it in the original book, so the page as printed gives method without amounts. Everything else about it still works.
- The missing proportionsSpiced peach recipes of this period commonly work out at something like 3-4 lb sugar and a pint of vinegar to 7-8 lb peaches, with a stick or two of cinnamon, but sources vary. Treat any figure as approximate; the original list is not on this page, so use a current spiced-peach recipe if you want exact quantities.
- "Rub off the fur"The fur is the fuzz. A quick dip in near-boiling water loosens it and a rough towel takes it off, leaving the skin on. If you would rather peel entirely, hold the peaches in boiling water 30-60 seconds and slip the skins.
- ClovesWhole cloves, four stuck into each fruit like studs in a ham. They are meant to be fished out or eaten around, not chewed; four per peach is already assertive.
- "One-half peaches at a time"Most likely this means cooking in batches of about half the fruit rather than halved peaches, though the phrasing is ambiguous. Either way the syrup must cover the fruit and stay at a simmer; crowding the pan drops the temperature and the fruit collapses on the bottom before the top layer softens.
- Cooking until softRipe but firm peaches take 5-10 minutes at a bare simmer. A hard boil splits the skins and pulls the cloves loose. Lift them out with a slotted spoon as they yield to a skewer rather than waiting for the whole batch.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied in strength; cider vinegar sold today is usually around 5 percent acidity, which is what modern preserving recipes assume. Do not dilute it.
- StorageThe recipe stops at cooking and says nothing about sealing. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve, good for a few weeks in a covered jar under its syrup. For shelf-stable jars follow a current tested canning procedure with stated processing times.
- ServingSweet-sour and heavily spiced, these are a condiment rather than a dessert. They belong beside ham, pork, cold roast fowl or a cheese board, one or two peaches per person.
Spiced or pickled peaches belong to the great nineteenth-century American habit of putting fruit down in a sugar-and-vinegar syrup, a technique inherited from English sweet pickling and applied enthusiastically to the peach once orchards in Delaware, Maryland and Georgia began sending fruit north by rail in quantity. Cloves stuck directly into the fruit is the same gesture as studding a ham, and clove, cinnamon and peach go with pork, which is why such jars tended to sit at the relish end of the table rather than with the jams. Recipes of this kind reflect a kitchen year organised around gluts: peaches arrived all at once, cheaply, in August, and a household that wanted them in January had to spice, pickle or seal them in the few weeks they were sound.