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Spiced Peaches
Peel and weigh your fruit, and to every five pounds of it allow two and a half pounds of sugar, a pint of vinegar, and spices-cloves, cinnamon, and mace-to taste. Let the peaches lie in the sugar for an hour and then drain off the syrup which has flowed from them and put it over the fire with a halfpint of water. As it boils, the scum will rise and must be taken off. When the scum does not rise any longer, put in the fruit. Boil for about five minutes, remove the peaches with a skimmer and spread on dishes. Put the spices and vinegar with the syrup and let it boil fifteen minutes. Arrange your fruit in glass jars and pour the syrup over it.
Some authorities suggest putting all the spices in a tiny cheesecloth bag, which keeps the syrup clearer.
A sweet vinegar pickle of the type nineteenth-century households put up by the peck. The proportions are given by weight of peeled fruit, so weigh after peeling and pitting, not before.
- The proportions in cupsFor 5 lb peeled peaches: 2 1/2 lb sugar is about 5 1/2 cups granulated, and a pint of vinegar is 2 cups. Use cider vinegar of 5 percent acidity; the recipe assumes ordinary vinegar, not a mild wine or rice vinegar.
- PeelingDip the peaches 30 to 45 seconds in boiling water and then into ice water; the skins slip off and the flesh stays firm. Freestone varieties are far easier to halve and pit than clingstones, though some older recipes used small clings whole, stuck with a few cloves.
- Whole spices onlyThe closing note about a cheesecloth bag is the practical instruction, not an afterthought. Use whole cloves, stick cinnamon and whole mace or blade mace; ground spices cloud the syrup and settle as grit in the jars. Roughly 1 tablespoon cloves, two or three cinnamon sticks and a few blades of mace suits 5 lb of fruit.
- The hour in sugarThis step is doing real work. Sugar draws juice out of the fruit by osmosis, which both firms the peaches and provides the base of the syrup, so do not shorten it or add water in its place. The half-pint of water added later is the only water in the recipe.
- Five minutes means five minutesThe fruit goes into the plain syrup only briefly. Peaches boiled longer collapse into jam; they will soften further as they stand in the hot syrup and over the following weeks.
- Reducing the syrupThe fifteen-minute boil with vinegar and spices is a reduction as well as an infusion. Expect a thin, pourable syrup rather than a jelly; if it looks watery, boil a few minutes more before pouring, as it thickens noticeably on cooling.
- Storage, which the original leaves outThere is no sealing or processing step here, so what you have is a refrigerator pickle: fill clean jars, cool, cover and keep cold, and use within a month or two. If you want jars that keep on a shelf, follow a current tested water-bath procedure for spiced peaches rather than simply capping these.
- Yield and servingFive pounds of peaches fills roughly three to five pint jars, depending on how closely they are packed. These are a condiment, not a dessert: a few halves with the syrup alongside ham, roast pork, cold beef or game, in the place a modern table gives chutney.
Spiced or "sweet-pickled" fruit was a fixture of American preserving from the early nineteenth century onward, and peaches were among its most common subjects; the same treatment was given to pears, crabapples, plums and watermelon rind as each came in. The formula belongs to a broader family of sweet-sour preserves usually traced to English pickling traditions, where sugar, vinegar and warm spices stood in for refrigeration and made abundant seasonal fruit last the winter. It was eaten as a relish for meat, offered from a dish at the side of the roast. The Butterick Cook Book, issued in 1911 by the pattern and magazine publisher, was aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns, and the offhand reference to "some authorities" is a reminder that by this date such a cook was consulting printed guidance, and often several competing books at once, rather than working only from what her mother had shown her.