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Spiced Peaches or Pears
Mrs. Henry M. Knickerbocker.
To two pounds good mellow peaches, use five pounds sugar, one pint of good vinegar, and some whole cloves or cinnamon. Take the sugar, vinegar, and cloves, and let them come to a boil, and turn over the fruit. This do three days in succession, and the last day put the fruit into the syrup, a few at a time, and let them just boil up.
A three-day sweet pickle of the old open-kettle school: the hot syrup is poured over the raw fruit and reboiled each day so the sugar draws in slowly instead of collapsing the peaches. A few things need translating.
- The sugar looks wrong, and may beTwo pounds of fruit to five pounds of sugar is several times the sugar of spiced-peach recipes commonly printed in the period, which often run nearer 3-4 lb sugar to 7 lb fruit. The figures may have been transposed in setting the type. As printed it will give a stiff, intensely sweet candied fruit rather than a spiced pickle.
- The hinge: pour, don't cookThe syrup is boiled and poured over the raw fruit on successive days; only on the last of those days does the fruit itself go into the syrup, a few at a time, to 'just boil up'. That gradual draw is what keeps the peaches whole instead of turning them to mush, and 'just boil up' means barely to a boil, not a simmer.
- Vinegar"Good vinegar" in this period usually meant cider vinegar, though household vinegar varied in strength; modern bottled cider vinegar is around 5 percent acidity. A pint is two cups.
- Spice quantityNone is given. A tablespoon of whole cloves or two or three cinnamon sticks per batch is in keeping with other recipes of the era; tie them in cheesecloth if you want to fish them out.
- The peaches themselves"Mellow" means ripe; use fruit that is ripe but not collapsing. Freestone peaches are easiest. The recipe gives no direction about peeling, though peaches for spicing were commonly peeled after scalding.
- PearsSmall hard pears such as Seckel appear often in period spiced-pear recipes, left whole with the stem on. They take longer in the syrup than peaches and hold their shape better.
- Yield and storageTwo pounds of fruit fills roughly two pint jars. The recipe gives no directions for putting the fruit up; for keeping at room temperature today, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for spiced fruit. Otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Spiced or "sweet pickled" fruit was a fixture of the American preserve closet in the second half of the nineteenth century, served alongside roast meats and cold ham in the way a chutney or cranberry sauce is now. Sugar and vinegar together did the preserving work at a time when reliable canning was still new and cellars were the only cold storage, and the three-day pour-and-reboil method was one common way among several to sweeten fruit without breaking it. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold for charity, is a good example of the community cookbook form: recipes like this one arrived as household shorthand between cooks who already knew how to peel a peach, which is why the spice quantity and the jarring are simply left out.