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Brandied Fruits
RANDY has long been used in preserving, and while the expenseis certainly not small, the outcome is most satisfactory. BRANDIED PEACHES, No. 1-Make a syrup, allowing three-fourths pound sugar and three-fourths cup of water for every pound fruit. Let it come to a boil and skim. Put in the peaches carefully, a layer at a time, let them boil until tender, then take up and pack in cans. Boil the syrup a little longer until thick, take from the fire and add a cup best brandy for every pound fruit.
BRANDIED PEACHES, No. 2-Four pounds of fruit; one pint of brandy; four pounds of sugar.
Peel the fruit as directed in the preceding recipe and cook it in the syrup in the same way. Boil the syrup down until quite thick, then add the brandy and take the kettle at once from the fire. Heat glass jars by pouring hot water in them, drain well, place the fruit, in them, filling as full as possible, pour in the hot syrup until the jar is full, and seal.
If after the fruit is placed in the jars some of the juice oozes from it, pour this off before turning on the syrup.
Pears are brandied the same as peaches and should be peeled also.
Plums when brandied should not be peeled; instead, they should be pricked well before cooking.
Two versions of the same preserve, both from the era before processing times and headspace were understood as safety measures rather than matters of taste. The notes below explain the language of the original and why the method itself is now obsolete.
- No heat processing at allBoth versions rely on packing hot fruit and hot syrup into a warmed jar and sealing it, with nothing afterward. Current preserving practice treats the boiling-water bath as the step that actually makes the jar safe and reliably sealed; hot-fill-and-seal alone is not accepted for fruit in syrup. Use a current tested recipe for brandied peaches if you want to put them up.
- Sealing hardware has changed"Seal" in this period meant a glass lid with a rubber ring and a wire bail, or a zinc cap over a rubber gasket, tightened while the contents were hot. Nothing in the original tells you how to verify a seal, and the two-piece lids sold today do not behave the same way under a bare hot fill.
- "Cans" means glass jarsThe word is used loosely throughout this section. No. 2 makes it explicit — glass jars, heated with hot water and drained so they do not crack when the boiling syrup goes in.
- The two brandy quantities do not agreeNo. 1 calls for a cup of brandy per pound of fruit; No. 2 uses a pint for four pounds, which works out to half a cup per pound, or half as much.
- Syrup ratioNo. 1 works out to three-quarters of a pound of sugar and six fluid ounces of water per pound of fruit — a heavy syrup by any standard, and the reason the original expects it to thicken quickly. No. 2 is a straight pound-for-pound proportion.
- Why the brandy goes in off the fireAlcohol boils off fast in an open kettle. Adding it after the syrup leaves the heat, as both versions direct, keeps the spirit in the jar rather than in the kitchen air. That much of the original logic is still sound.
- Peeling and prickingPeaches and pears are peeled; plums are not peeled but, as the original directs, pricked well before cooking. The text does not say what to prick them with or how many times.
- ExpenseThe opening remark about cost is not a throwaway: a pint of good brandy per four pounds of fruit was a serious outlay.
Brandied fruit belongs to the older tradition in which alcohol, sugar and heat were the three available defences against spoilage. Peaches were a common choice in American versions of the preserve, and brandying was one way to hold a few jars of summer fruit back for later in the year. Instructions of this vintage predate the standardised processing times worked out by American agricultural extension services in the following decades, which is why the sealing directions read so casually to a modern eye.