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Pickled Peaches
Mrs. C. D. Howard.
Take five pounds of brown sugar to one gallon of pure cider vinegar; boil it hard for thirty minutes, skimming off the scum till clear; rub off the peaches in the meantime out of boiling water (quickly) with a flannel cloth, sticking four cloves in each peach; and put a bag of cinnamon into the boiling syrup. If the peaches are clingstones, put them into the boiling syrup for fifteen or twenty minutes; if freestones, lay them in the jar in layers, and pour the syrup over them while hot; then put a small plate over to keep them from rising, and cover tightly with cloth or paper. In four days look at them, and if necessary, boil the syrup again, and pour on while hot; keep them in a cool place while the weather is hot to prevent their souring. The White Sugar Cling is nice for pickling, and the Blood Peach is very rich, but dark. Small pears can be pickled in the same manner, if the skin is taken off.
A sweet-sour spiced peach in the standard nineteenth-century proportion of vinegar, sugar and whole spice. The method is sound; the storage is the part that has been superseded.
- The hinge: keep the fruit under the syrupThe small plate is not decoration. Peaches that bob above the surface spoil first. The original also warns about souring in hot weather, and tells you to keep the jar in a cool place. Weight the fruit and check it.
- Storage, brought up to dateCloth or paper over a crock is an open ferment-and-hope arrangement, which is why the recipe tells you to reboil the syrup after four days. For anything beyond a few weeks in the refrigerator, follow a current tested water-bath process for pickled peaches; the vinegar ratio here is amply acidic for it, but the sealing and processing times need to come from a modern source.
- ScaleA gallon of vinegar and five pounds of sugar makes a very large batch of syrup; the recipe never says how much fruit it is meant to cover. For a household quantity, quarter it: 1 quart vinegar, 1 1/4 lb brown sugar, and about 4 lb peaches.
- Boiling the syrup hard for thirty minutesThis is a reduction as much as a skimming step. Expect a thicker, darker syrup at the end of it; do not top it back up with water.
- "Rub off the peaches out of boiling water"Blanch 30-45 seconds and skin them, working fast so they do not cook. A clean kitchen towel does what the flannel did. Drop them into cold water only if you are peeling a large batch, and drain well.
- Cling versus freestoneThe recipe gives clingstones fifteen to twenty minutes in the hot syrup, and freestones no cooking at all: they are layered in the jar and covered with hot syrup, presumably because the softer flesh will not stand boiling. Use firm, slightly underripe fruit either way.
- Cloves and cinnamonFour whole cloves per peach is assertive by current taste and the flavour strengthens over weeks. Two is plenty. The recipe does not say what form the cinnamon takes; stick cinnamon tied in a cloth or muslin bag is the usual reading, and lifting it out before storing keeps the syrup from going muddy.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less refined and more molasses-heavy than today's light brown. Dark brown sugar gets closer to the intended colour and depth.
- The varieties namedWhite Sugar Cling and Blood Peach are heirlooms you will not meet at a supermarket. Any firm yellow clingstone works; for the dark version, a red-fleshed peach from a farm stand.
Sweet spiced pickles of this kind sat on nineteenth-century American tables as a relish for roast and boiled meats, in the same role a chutney or cranberry sauce plays now, and peaches are often said to have been the fruit of choice because the crop came in far faster than any household could eat it fresh. The clove-studded peach in sugared cider vinegar appears in cookbooks across the century with only small variations in spice; the essential arithmetic, several pounds of sugar to the gallon of vinegar, is generally understood as a preserving formula rather than a matter of taste. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was a compiled charity cookbook, its recipes contributed under the names of the women who supplied them, which is why this one carries Mrs. C. D. Howard's signature and her private opinions about which peach varieties are worth the trouble. That kind of attribution is the whole character of the book: not a professional's system but a neighbourhood's accumulated practice, including the frank admission that the pickle may need its syrup boiled up again in four days.