Home › Sweet and Spiced Pickles › Brandy Peaches
Brandy Peaches
Use cling-stone white peaches. Pare them by pouring boiling hot water (a few at a time) on them. Prick each one to the stone with a silver fork. Make a syrup with half a pound of sugar for each pound of peaches and half a teacupful of water for each pound of sugar; also add a little white of egg slightly beaten. Skim when it boils, as long as the scum rises. Then put in the peaches (a few at a time), boiling them slowly until they are just tender and no longer; then take them carefully out. Before removing the syrup from the fire, boil until it is a nice rich thick syrup and add to it a half a pint of the best brandy to a pound of peaches. A little more brandy may be added to each jar. Put in glass cans and seal.
Apricots and green gages brandied are made in the same way.
A late-Victorian brandied fruit put up in syrup, with proportions given by weight rather than by jar. The one figure to look at hard is the brandy: half a pint per pound of fruit is roughly a cup of spirit for every three peaches, which is far heavier than any modern version.
- Peeling"Pouring boiling hot water on them" means blanching to loosen the skins. Thirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into ice water, and the skins slip off; leave them in the hot water any longer and the flesh under the skin turns mushy.
- Clingstone, and whyClingstones are firmer and tend to hold their shape better through boiling, which is the likely reason the recipe calls for them; freestones are more apt to fall apart. White clingstones are a farmers'-market item now; a firm, slightly underripe yellow clingstone works and is easier to find.
- The silver forkSilver was specified to avoid the iron and steel of the period, which discoloured acidic fruit at the puncture points. Any stainless fork is fine. Do not skip the pricking — it lets syrup penetrate and keeps the skinned fruit from bursting.
- TeacupfulAn ambiguous measure in this book; period teacups are generally reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacupful is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces (4 to 6 tablespoons) of water per pound of sugar. Treat it as a starting point and judge the syrup by eye — the fruit will release a good deal of juice.
- Egg whiteAn old clarifying trick: the albumen coagulates and carries scum to the surface, where it is skimmed off. It does nothing for flavour and modern granulated sugar throws almost no scum. Omit it and skim as needed.
- Boiling the fruit"Just tender and no longer" is the hinge. Peaches go from firm to disintegrating in a minute or two at a slow simmer; lift each batch out with a slotted spoon the moment a skewer meets no resistance, and reduce the syrup afterward without them in it.
- Adding the brandyBetter added off the heat, or the alcohol boils away; the original is ambiguous here, since it has the brandy going in before the syrup is taken from the fire. The quantity is period-appropriate but very high — a cup per pound of fruit gives a preserve closer to a cordial. A quarter of that is nearer modern taste, and the fruit still keeps well in refrigeration.
- Sealing"Put in glass cans and seal" reflects period practice and is not a tested canning process. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current water-bath procedure for brandied peaches; otherwise pack them hot into clean jars, cool, and keep them in the refrigerator, where the sugar and spirit will hold them for months.
Brandied fruit belongs to the older, pre-canning end of preserving, where sugar and spirit did the work that heat processing later took over — the same logic as the ratafias and cherry bounces of eighteenth-century English and colonial households. Brandy peaches in particular became a fixture of American, and especially Southern, preserve closets in the nineteenth century, put up in high summer and brought out with cake or cold meat through the winter. The mention of green gages is a good period marker: that small, sweet green plum was a common garden fruit then and is a specialty item now. Placing the recipe among the sweet and spiced pickles rather than the desserts reflects how such jars were actually used — as a sharp, sweet relish on the table beside the roast, not only as something spooned over ice cream.