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Pickled Peaches
Allow to fourteen pounds of peaches weighted after peeling, three quarts of vinegar and six pounds of brown sugar. Mix together in a plate or saucer a tablespoonful of blades of mace, two ounces of stick cinnamon broken up into small pieces, one teaspoonful of cloves. Lay at the bottom of a two-gallon jar about one quart of the peaches, cover with sugar, and sprinkle over a portion of the mixed spices. Then lay in more peaches covering as before with sugar and spices. Proceed in this manner till the jar is full or till all the peaches, sugar and spice are used. Then pour in the vinegar, put a plate or saucer over the fruit to keep it well under the vinegar, tie a cloth tight over the top of the jar, and set it over the fire in a saucepan half-full of cold water. Let the water boil till the peaches are soft enough to pierce with a straw.
A sweet spiced vinegar pickle scaled for a hotel larder. The method is a bain-marie: the jar of fruit is cooked gently in a pot of water rather than boiled directly, which keeps the peaches whole.
- Scale it downFourteen pounds of peeled peaches fills the two-gallon jar the recipe calls for. Quartering the recipe — 3 1/2 lb peaches, 1 1/2 lb brown sugar, 3 cups vinegar — fits a large domestic jar or two quart jars.
- Vinegar strengthUse cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is what modern bottled vinegar is. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid wine or fruit vinegar; the vinegar is doing the preserving here, not the heat.
- Blades of maceMace blades are the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. A tablespoon of blades is only a couple of grams. Ground mace is not a good substitute in a clear pickle — it clouds the syrup. Whole cloves, not ground, for the same reason.
- Tie the spices upThe original layers spices loose among the fruit, which means picking cinnamon shards out of the finished pickle. A cheesecloth bag lets you fish them out and keeps the syrup from turning muddy.
- PeelingBlanch the peaches 30 to 45 seconds in boiling water and slip the skins. Freestone varieties are easier to halve and stone; clingstones hold their shape better whole. The weight is taken after peeling, so buy about 20 percent more than the recipe calls for.
- The straw testThis is the hinge. "Soft enough to pierce with a straw" is very close to falling apart — start checking with a thin skewer once the water has come to a boil and pull the pot off the heat the moment the fruit gives. Peaches carry on cooking in the hot syrup, and overcooked ones collapse into fibres.
- The cloth is not a sealA cloth tied over a crock was a larder practice for a cool cellar, and the water bath here softens the fruit rather than processing sealed jars. Refrigerate the finished pickle and eat it within a couple of months; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for pickled peaches.
- ServingGive it two to three weeks before opening so the spice and vinegar settle into the fruit. Two or three halves per person alongside baked ham, roast pork, cold game or a cheese plate.
Sweet spiced fruit pickles were a fixture of the nineteenth-century American table, and peaches were among the common subjects — cheap, abundant in late summer, and firm enough to survive a spiced vinegar syrup. Whole spiced peaches were the standard accompaniment to ham and cold roast meats, doing the job a chutney or fruit mostarda does now. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was ma"itre d'hôtel at the Waldorf, gathers a good deal of this kind of domestic preserving alongside the hotel's restaurant cookery; the quantities here — fourteen pounds of fruit, a two-gallon jar — are a reminder that a hotel larder and a farm kitchen were working at much the same scale. The layering technique, sugar and spice built up in strata, is older than the book.