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Brandied Peaches
Peel and cut in halves the equivalent of five pounds fresh, ripe, sound peaches, remove stones and place peaches in a glass jar. Crack peach stones, remove almonds and add to the peaches in the jar. Add a pound powdered sugar, fill jar with brandy, shake well, tightly cork, let infuse for thirty days, and peaches will then be ready.
The fruit-and-brandy part of this is sound preserving practice, but the instruction to crack the stones and add the kernels puts a known toxin into the jar and keeps it there for a month.
- The "almonds" in the stonesThe kernel inside a peach pit is not an almond. It contains amygdalin, which yields hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed, and which is converted to cyanide in the body once swallowed. Bitter almonds carry the same compound, which is why the sale of unprocessed bitter almonds is restricted in the United States.
- Why the alcohol makes it worse, not betterWhy the alcohol does not make it safe -- Brandy is mostly water and will draw the bitter-kernel compounds out of the cracked stones, and thirty days is ample time for them to pass into the liquid. Nothing in this method is likely to drive them off or destroy them, since the jar is never heated.
- The quantity is not trivialFive pounds of peaches means roughly fifteen to twenty stones, and every kernel goes into a single jar of liquid that is meant to be drunk as well as eaten. The recipe gives no upper limit and no way to judge the dose.
- Not an ordinary kitchen riskHot fat and sharp knives are hazards a cook controls. This is a chemical one that gives no warning beyond a marzipan smell, and the danger sits in the part of the recipe that looks like a flourish rather than a step.
- If you want brandied peachesUse a current, tested recipe for fruit put up in spirits. They exist in quantity, they omit the kernels, and they specify sugar-to-spirit ratios and headspace.
- On the historical logicThe kernels were added for the bitter-almond flavour that pairs with stone fruit, the same note sought in noyau and ratafia. Modern versions get it from a drop of almond extract or a splash of amaretto, with no amygdalin involved.
Fruit steeped in spirit and sugar is one of the oldest domestic preserving methods in Europe, older than reliable canning, and it survived into printed cookbooks of the early twentieth century because it needed no heat and no thermometer: the alcohol did the work, though this recipe still calls for the jar to be tightly corked. Cracking the stones and adding the kernels is associated with the bitter-almond note sought in noyau, a liqueur flavoured with stone-fruit pits, and it appears in nineteenth-century preserving literature. The toxicity of amygdalin was known to chemists by the mid-nineteenth century, but long custom kept the practice in household recipes for decades afterwards. Brandied peaches were a familiar American preserve, eaten with cold meats or as a sweet.