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Stewed Peaches
1115. Prepare a thin syrup of about six ounces of sugar to half a pint of water, with a little lemon juice and a few blanched kernels. Pare six peaches, and stew them for twenty minutes gently in the syrup. Lay the fruit in a dish; boil up the syrup till it is thick, then pour it and the kernels over the peaches. Should the fruit be unripe, it should be simmered in boiling water till the skin can easily be removed. The above may be served hot at dinner, or cold at supper or dessert.
A straightforward compote in the Victorian manner, but the flavouring it depends on is one we no longer put on the table.
- The kernels are the problemThe "blanched kernels" are the seeds from inside the peach stones. They contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed; apricot kernels are the best-documented domestic source of cyanide poisoning, and peach kernels contain the same compound. Cooking may reduce the amygdalin but cannot be relied on to remove it. This recipe both infuses the kernels in the syrup and pours them over the fruit to be eaten.
- Why old books use them freelyKernels were a household stand-in for bitter almond and ratafia flavouring, and cookery writers of the period called for a few of them as a matter of course. That they were used in small quantities is no reason to repeat the practice. If you want stewed peaches, follow a current recipe.
- Half a pintIn a British book of this date, half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, not the 8 fl oz American half-pint.
- Six ounces of sugarBy weight, roughly 170 g, or a scant cup of granulated sugar by volume. Boiled down at the end it gives a distinctly heavy syrup rather than a light poaching liquid.
- The twenty minutesTwenty minutes of gentle stewing suits firm, barely ripe fruit; fully ripe peaches will collapse well inside that time. Note that the recipe handles genuinely unripe fruit separately, by scalding to loosen the skin.
- YieldSix peaches serves four to six, hot at dinner or cold at supper or dessert, as the original suggests.