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Peach Sauce
When preserving peaches take the broken pieces and halves not perfect enough for putting in jars and make a sauce of them. Add vinegar, clove, cinnamon, and sugar, and boil all together until of the right consistency.
This is less a recipe than a preserving-day habit: the bruised halves and slivers left over after packing jars get boiled down into a sweet-sour spiced sauce. No quantities are given, so the proportions are yours to set.
- A workable ratioFor every 2 lb of peach scraps, start with about 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup vinegar, then taste and adjust. The original assumes you know the sweet-sour balance you want; period versions of spiced peaches often ran far sweeter than modern palates like.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in this period was of inconsistent and unrecorded strength, so the original gives no way to judge acidity. Standard 5% cider vinegar is the right choice here, and it is worth adding it in stages rather than all at once.
- Whole spice, not groundClove and cinnamon here most likely meant whole cloves and a stick or two of cinnamon (much of what was sold as cinnamon in this period was cassia). Tie them in a scrap of cloth so they can be lifted out; ground spice will cloud the sauce and turn the clove harsh and medicinal.
- Clove restraintClove dominates fast. Four or five whole cloves per 2 lb of fruit is plenty for a sauce this size, and they should be pulled once the flavour reads.
- "The right consistency"Aim for the thickness of a loose apple sauce or thin chutney, roughly 20 to 30 minutes at a steady simmer. It will thicken further as it cools, so stop while it still slides off the spoon.
- ScorchingSugar and low-pectin peach flesh catch quickly on the bottom once the water cooks off. Use a heavy pan and stir through the last ten minutes.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of trimmings gives roughly a pint, give or take, depending on how far you reduce it. Treat it as a refrigerator sauce, good for two or three weeks; if you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath recipe with measured acidity rather than this one.
- How to serve itThis is a condiment, not a dessert sauce. It belongs beside ham, pork, cold roast fowl or a sharp cheese, in the way a chutney would be used now.
Spiced and pickled peaches were a fixture of American preserving from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and regional cookbooks of the period carried versions: fruit, sugar, cider vinegar, clove and cinnamon, boiled to a syrup and put up for winter. What makes this entry characteristic of a left-overs book is that it begins where the main job ends. Preserving day meant sorting fruit by looks, since only sound, evenly sized halves would pack handsomely into glass, and the broken and bruised pieces were the inevitable residue. Rather than treating that as waste, the writer redirects it into a sauce where appearance does not matter at all. The spice pairing of clove and cinnamon with vinegar is the same sweet-sour formula behind mincemeat, pickled pears and the various "sweet pickles" of the era, a taste generally traced back through English cookery to the medieval habit of spicing preserved fruit for the meat table.