Home › Canning And Preserving › Sweet Pickled Peaches
Sweet Pickled Peaches
½ peck peaches 2 lbs. brown sugar 1 pint vinegar 1 oz. stick cinnamon
What survives here is an ingredient list, not a procedure: there is no cooking time, no jar treatment, no processing step, and no indication of how long the fruit keeps. That gap is the problem, and it cannot be filled by guesswork.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts; a peck of peaches weighs roughly 12 to 14 lb, so half a peck is about 6 to 7 lb, or perhaps 16 to 18 medium fruit. The quantity of syrup given — 2 lb sugar to 1 pint vinegar — is small for that weight of fruit, and the surviving text does not say how it was applied.
- No processing instruction at allOlder sweet pickle recipes of this kind frequently relied on hot fruit and hot syrup packed into a hot jar, with no boiling-water bath, though nothing in this text describes any jar treatment. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water process timed for jar size and altitude, because seals formed by residual heat alone fail unpredictably and the failure is invisible.
- Acidity is unverifiedThe safety of a pickled pack depends on the finished acidity of the syrup, not on the vinegar volume alone, and the strength of the vinegar here is unstated. Home-made and older commercial vinegars were not standardised at the 5 percent acetic acid that current recipes assume. Without a known vinegar strength there is no way to know where this pack lands.
- Spices and cloudingAn ounce of stick cinnamon is a large quantity, on the order of a dozen sticks. It was often tied in a cloth bag so it could be lifted out; left loose it breaks down and clouds the syrup, and in a sealed jar it will go on darkening the fruit.
- If you want to make theseSweet pickled peaches are still worth making, but use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, headspace and processing time. Treat this entry as a record of proportions rather than as directions.
Sweet spiced fruit in vinegar — peaches, pears, crabapples, watermelon rind — was a fixture of the American preserving closet through the nineteenth century, descended from the older English practice of pickling fruit to serve alongside cold meat and game. Fruit, brown sugar, vinegar and stick cinnamon are the usual components of such recipes, often with cloves stuck into each peach. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book grouped preserves and pickles in a chapter of their own.