Home › Preserves › Peach Marmalade
Peach Marmalade
Choose ripe, well-flavored fruit, and it is well to make with pre. serves, reserving for marmalade those that are too soft. The flavor is improved by first boiling the pits in the water with which the syrup is to be made. Quarter the peaches and boil thirty minutes before adding sugar, stirring almost constantly from the time the peaches begin to be tender; add sugar in the proportion of threefourths pound sugar to one pound fruit, continue to boil and stir for an hour longer, and put up in jars, pressing paper over them as directed for jellies.
A plain long-boil peach marmalade with no added pectin: the set comes entirely from evaporation and the fruit's own pectin, which is why the times look so long. The proportions are workable, but two of the instructions belong to a sealing tradition that has been abandoned.
- The hinge: constant stirringOnce the sugar goes in and the mass thickens, it will scorch on the bottom in seconds and the whole batch will taste burnt. Use a wide, heavy pan, keep a flat-edged wooden spoon moving across the base, and turn the heat down as it approaches the set.
- Sugar proportionThree-quarters pound sugar to one pound of prepared fruit is roughly 1 3/4 cups sugar per pound of peaches. Weigh the peaches after pitting and quartering.
- The hour of boiling is not a ruleAn hour after sugaring assumes soft, watery fruit and a slack pan. Judge by a set test instead: a spoonful chilled on a cold plate should wrinkle when pushed, or a thermometer should read 220F at sea level. In a wide pan the set may come well before the hour is up.
- Boiling the pitsThis was done to borrow the faint almond note from the kernels. Peach kernels contain the same cyanogenic compound as bitter almonds, so if you want that flavor use a drop of almond extract and leave the pits out; the whole stones simmered briefly and discarded contribute very little anyway.
- SkinsThe recipe says only to quarter the fruit. Peach skin toughens into papery flecks over a long boil, so blanch and slip the skins first unless you want them in the finished jar.
- "Pressing paper over them as directed for jellies"That means a paper or brandied-paper cover under a paste-sealed lid, relying on the sugar alone; surface mould was a common result. Fill clean hot half-pint jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldFour pounds of peaches with three pounds of sugar gives roughly seven to eight half-pint jars.
The Dixie Cook-Book touches on the problem of a Southern summer: fruit arriving faster than a household could eat it, in a climate where it spoiled within a day or two. The frank instruction to reserve the best peaches for whole preserves and send the over-soft ones to marmalade is the economics of a home orchard rather than a market — soft fruit will not hold its shape in syrup, but it breaks down beautifully into a mass. The word marmalade reached English from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only later narrowed in British usage toward citrus; in nineteenth-century American books it still means any fruit cooked to a thick pulp with sugar. Preserving at this sugar level, in these quantities, was the standard method before home canning with sealed glass and a water bath became routine in the early twentieth century, and the paper cover at the end of this recipe is a relic of that older practice.