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Peach Jelly
Crack one-third of the kernels and put them in the jar with the peaches, which should be pared, stoned and sliced. Heat in a pot of boiling water, stirring occasionally until the fruit is well broken. • Strain, and to every pint of peach juice add the juice of a lemon. Measure again, and to every pint of peach juice add a pound of sugar. Heat the sugar very hot, and add when the juice has boiled twenty minutes. Let it come to a boil and take instantly from the fire. This is very fine for jelly cake.
The jelly-making itself is conventional, but the flavouring is not: this recipe deliberately extracts the peach kernels, which are a source of cyanide. Use a current peach jelly recipe instead.
- The kernels are the problemPeach stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel tissue is crushed and wetted. Cracking one-third of the kernels from a jar of peaches and steeping them in warm juice is an efficient extraction, and the compound carries into the strained liquid rather than staying with the solids.
- The quantity is unmeasurable"One-third of the kernels" scales with however many peaches are in the jar, and amygdalin content varies widely between varieties and stages of ripeness. There is no way to know what dose ends up in a jar of the finished jelly, and food safety authorities now advise avoiding or strictly limiting consumption of raw peach and apricot kernels.
- Cooking does not remove itCooking does not reliably remove it -- the twenty-minute boil comes only after the kernels have already given up their flavour to the juice, and straining removes the solids, not the dissolved compounds.
- What the kernels were forThey were a free substitute for bitter almond, supplying the marzipan note that reads as "peachy" in old preserves. Modern recipes get the same effect from a drop of almond extract, whose flavour compound is benzaldehyde, and which carries none of the risk.
- The rest of the method, for context"Heat in a pot of boiling water" (the fruit having been put in a jar) is a bain-marie extraction, meant to draw clear juice without scorching. A pound of sugar to a pint of juice is a common preserving ratio of the period, and the lemon supplies the acid that peaches, being low in both acid and pectin, cannot provide on their own.
- Jelly cakeThe closing line refers to a Victorian layer cake spread with jelly rather than frosting.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large compiled household manuals that circulated in the American South in the 1880s, assembled from contributed receipts and reprinted with regional additions. Peach kernels appear constantly in nineteenth-century preserving: cooks in peach-growing districts had bushels of stones to hand and used them the way an expensive kitchen used bitter almonds or ratafia, cracking a few into brandied fruit, custards and cordials for that faintly bitter almond perfume. The French liqueur noyau, named simply for the fruit stone, was built on the same principle. The chemistry of amygdalin was understood by the mid-1800s, but the risk seems to have been thought of as belonging to concentrated bitter-almond oil rather than to a handful of kernels in a preserving jar, and the practice survived in print for decades after that distinction stopped looking defensible.