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Peach Butter
Mrs. M. L.
Take pound for pound of peaches and sugar; cook peaches alone until they become soft, then put in onehalf the sugar, and stir for one-half hour; then the remainder of sugar, and stir an hour and a-half. Season with cloves and cinnamon.
A nineteenth-century fruit butter reduced by long, slow stirring rather than by pectin or a thermometer. The recipe assumes an open kettle, a coal range and someone standing at it for two hours.
- Pound for poundEqual weights of prepared fruit and sugar — 2 lb peaches to 2 lb sugar is a sensible household batch. Weigh the peaches after pitting, not before.
- Peel and pit firstThe recipe takes this as understood. Blanch the peaches 30 seconds, slip the skins, and remove the stones; skins left in tend to give a stringy butter unless the pulp is passed through a sieve.
- Never crack the stonesSome period fruit-butter recipes call for a few kernels for flavour. Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide. Ignore that practice.
- Low heat and constant stirringThis is the hinge. Once the sugar goes in, the mixture scorches easily and a burnt bottom flavours the whole batch. Use a heavy wide pan and a flat-edged wooden spoon that reaches the corners.
- Two hours is about rightThe full two hours of stirring is not padding — it is how the butter thickens without added pectin. It is done when a spoonful mounded on a cold plate holds its shape and no watery ring seeps out.
- SplatterReduced fruit purée spits like lava at the end. A splatter screen or a partly covering lid, tipped to let steam escape, saves the arms.
- SpicesNo quantities are given. Start with 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves per 2 lb of fruit, added in the last half hour so they do not turn dusty and bitter.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is given, and it depends on how far the butter is reduced; since the sugar does not cook away, expect appreciably more than a couple of cups from 2 lb of peaches with 2 lb of sugar. The original gives no sealing instructions; refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure if you want it shelf-stable.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local housekeepers, with proceeds going to charity — one of the earliest and most widely imitated American community cookbooks; its contributors are identified variously, some by full name and some, as here, by initials only. Fruit butters of this kind were a preserving strategy as much as a sweet: peaches ripen all at once and rot quickly, and cooking them down with their own weight in sugar produced something that kept through the winter in crocks commonly sealed with paper and melted wax. The name "butter" refers only to the spreading consistency, achieved here purely by evaporation, since commercial pectin was not sold to home cooks until the twentieth century. Cloves and cinnamon were a common warm-spice pairing for put-up fruit in this period.