Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Peach Jam
Peach Jam
Procure ripe clingstone peaches, peel them, crack the stones and blanch the kernels. Put the kernels in a mortar and pound them well. Put the skins and broken stones in a pan with twice the quantity of water required for the jam, and boil it till reduced one-half. Then strain the liquor through a fine hair-sieve. Put the peaches in a preserving-pan with the pounded kernels, and for every pound of fruit put in one pound of preserving-sugar, and a teacupful of the liquor from the stones, etc. Boil the mixture, keeping it well stirred until reduced to a stiff consistency. Fill some jars with the jam, and let them stand until the following day. Then sift a small quantity of fine sugar over each, cover them with rounds of paper that have been dipped in beaten egg, and tie round with twine. Keep the jars in a dry store-cupboard for use.
This is a Victorian-style preserve that builds its flavour on the peach kernel, the almond-scented seed inside the stone. That is precisely the part of the fruit that modern food safety rules out, and the sealing method is no longer considered a seal at all.
- The kernels are the problemPeach kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted. Pounding blanched kernels in a mortar is the exact action that liberates it, and the recipe adds the resulting paste directly to the jam.
- The stone liquor concentrates itThe stone liquor adds an unknown amount -- The skins and the cracked, emptied stones are boiled and the liquid reduced by half, and a teacupful goes into every pound of fruit. Most of the amygdalin is in the kernels themselves, which have already been pounded into the jam, but there is no way to know from the instructions how much ends up in the finished jar.
- No stated quantity"Crack the stones" gives no count. A batch made from a few pounds of clingstones could carry a dozen or more kernels, and the dose scales with the fruit rather than being controlled independently. Kernels were commonly used as a flavouring in recipes of this era.
- The seal is not a sealSugar sifted over the surface and a round of paper dipped in beaten egg, tied with twine, was the standard nineteenth-century closure. It excludes dust and slows mould; it does not exclude air or microorganisms, and it is not a substitute for processed, properly sealed jars.
- Almond flavour without the kernelIf the almond note is what appeals, it comes from benzaldehyde, which is what commercial almond extract supplies. A current, tested peach jam recipe with a measured amount of extract gives the same character with none of the risk.
- What to make insteadUse a modern peach jam recipe with tested proportions of fruit, sugar and acid, and a stated processing time for the jar size. Do not adapt this one.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathered a great deal of standard English and American household cookery alongside the Waldorf's own dishes, and this jam belongs squarely to the older tradition. Cracking the stones and pounding the kernels was common in nineteenth-century preserving: cooks used peach, apricot and cherry kernels much as they used bitter almonds -- kernel-flavoured liqueurs of this sort were known as noyau -- and boiling the skins and stones for a flavoured liquor made further use of the fruit. Clingstones, which hold their shape, were the usual canning peach of the period, though the recipe does not say why they are specified. The egg-and-paper cover is equally of its time and persisted alongside the screw-top glass jars already available by the 1890s; the toxicity of cyanogenic kernels was understood in principle by chemists of the era but had not translated into kitchen practice, and recipes like this one persisted in print well into the twentieth century.