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Peach Marmalade
Put some ripe autumn peaches that have been peeled and stoned in layers in a deep dish, cover them thickly with crushed loaf sugar and leave them for twenty-four hours. Place the peaches in a preserving-pan putting in one pound of sugar for each pound of peaches. Boil till thick, then pass them through a fine hair-sieve. Crack the stones, peel a few of the kernels, boil them in a little thin syrup and mix with the marmalade. When cold, put it in a glass-dish, and serve.
The peach preserve itself is straightforward nineteenth-century work, but the finishing step — cracking the stones and stirring the boiled kernels into the marmalade — is the reason this page carries a warning.
- The kernels are the problemPeach stones enclose a kernel rich in amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or wetted. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous, and peach and apricot kernels are generally more concentrated than sweet almonds by a wide margin.
- Boiling in syrup does not make them safeBrief simmering drives off some volatile cyanide but does not reliably destroy the glycoside, and the recipe gives no quantity beyond "a few" and no idea of how long. There is no way to read this instruction as a controlled dose.
- The marmalade is not strained afterwardsThe peaches are passed through the sieve before the kernels go in, so whatever was extracted stays in the finished dish, which is then served cold by the spoonful. Nothing downstream removes it.
- Use a current recipeIf you want the almond note that Oscar was after, a modern peach preserve recipe with a little almond extract achieves it. Do not improvise a corrected version of this one.
- Terms, for reading"Loaf sugar" is refined sugar broken from a cone, equivalent to modern granulated; a "hair-sieve" is a fine horsehair-mesh strainer, the ancestor of a nylon tamis. The equal weight of sugar to fruit is normal for the period.
- Not a canning recipeNote that nothing here is sealed or stored — the marmalade goes into a glass dish and is served. Whatever else is wrong with it, it was never intended to keep on a shelf.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) collected the working repertoire of a great American hotel kitchen, and this preserve belongs to a long European tradition of flavouring fruit conserves with the fruit's own kernel — the principle behind noyau liqueurs, crème de noyaux, and the "peach water" and "ratafia" flavourings that fill eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books. Before commercial almond extract was cheap and ubiquitous, cooks are often said to have reached for whatever benzaldehyde-bearing kernel was to hand: bitter almonds, apricot pits, cherry stones, peach stones. The toxicity was not unknown at the time — writers occasionally cautioned against using too many kernels — but it seems to have been treated as a matter of restraint rather than of chemistry, and instructions ran to little more than "a few of the kernels." Kernel flavourings of this kind eventually gave way in domestic cookery to standardised extracts.<pre></pre>