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Peach Butter
Four pounds of fruit; one lemon; one pound of sugar.
Pare, stone, and weigh the fruit, allowing sugar as above. Place the fruit in the preserving-kettle and heat very slowly, adding no water. When it is quite soft pass the peaches through a fine sieve, return the pulp to the fire, add the sugar, and boil twenty minutes. Just before taking from the fire add the lemon juice. Put up the same as jelly.
A fruit butter rather than a jam: only a quarter pound of sugar per pound of fruit, so it depends on long reduction and correct sealing rather than sugar for keeping. Two things in the original need updating — how thick you cook it, and how you put it up.
- Weigh after peelingThe instruction is to pare, stone, and then weigh, so four pounds means four pounds of prepared flesh — roughly five pounds of whole peaches. Sugar is calculated on that trimmed weight.
- The preserving-kettleA wide, heavy pan: enamelled cast iron or stainless. Untinned iron will react with the fruit acid and the lemon; copper was the traditional preserving metal but is best avoided for a long acidic cook. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what makes a butter.
- No water, very slow heatThis is the hinge. Peaches release their own juice, but only if brought up gently; rush it and the bottom layer scorches before the top has collapsed. Start over low heat with the lid on for the first ten minutes and stir often.
- Sieve or food millA food mill fitted with the fine plate does in two minutes what the fine sieve did in twenty, and gives the same skinless, seed-free pulp. A blender is not equivalent — it aerates the purée and lightens the colour.
- Twenty minutes is a starting point, not a finishThickness depends on the juiciness of your fruit and on your pan. Cook until a spoonful mounded on a chilled plate holds its shape without a ring of liquid weeping out, which may take thirty to forty-five minutes. Stir constantly toward the end; a thick butter spits and catches.
- Lemon lastAdded at the finish, the juice keeps its brightness and raises the acidity of a low-sugar preserve. One lemon gives roughly three tablespoons.
- "Put up the same as jelly"In this period that commonly meant pouring into glasses and sealing with a paraffin cap, though sealed jars were also used. Paraffin seals are no longer considered sound — they crack and admit mould. Ladle hot into hot sterilised jars and either refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or process in a boiling-water bath following a current tested time for peach butter at your altitude.
- YieldAbout three to four half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of the preserving shelf: no added water, little sugar, and a long slow cook that concentrates a large quantity of soft or slightly overripe fruit into a small quantity of spreadable pulp. The technique reached American kitchens most visibly through the Pennsylvania German apple-butter tradition, where whole communities boiled cider and apples down in outdoor kettles, and the same method was readily applied to peaches, plums and quinces as orchards allowed. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) belongs to a generation of household manuals published by pattern and magazine companies for middle-class women running kitchens without full-time staff. Its canning section leans on ratios by weight — four pounds of fruit to one pound of sugar — the general convention of the period, before tested processing times existed. Sealing instructions of the period, the "same as jelly" here, often meant a layer of melted paraffin poured over the cooled surface, a practice that persisted in home kitchens for decades before being set aside in favour of heat processing.