Preserved Peaches

History

This is recipe No. 93, "Preserved Peaches," in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881) — the first of two preserved-peach recipes Abby Fisher gives, the other appearing later as No. 132. Here she peels the fruit: "Have cling peaches, peel them, cut them in half and take the kernels out. Put peaches in sugar, a layer of peaches, then a layer of sugar." Peaches and sugar are weighed equally, layered about six inches deep and left a day and a night. The next day the accumulated sugar and juice are boiled, the peaches go in for ten minutes at a time in batches, and the process repeats until they are preserved.

Peaches recur through this book more than any other fruit — two preserves, peach pie, sweet pickle peach, two brandy peaches, peach marmalade, peach cobbler. The culinary historian Robert W. Brower treated that as evidence in tracing Fisher's origins, noting Orangeburg, South Carolina was and is excellent peach country and that "the ingredients list alone and the large number of peach recipes support a strong inference that Abby Fisher's cookbook is not a low country cookbook."

Fisher was born in Orangeburg in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton. Brower's research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She dictated the book from "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years," and her preserving won two medals at the 1880 San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair and a diploma at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair.

The record documents no specific earlier origin for this particular method; it is Fisher's own, set down under her name.

Ingredients

• cling peaches
• sugar

Instructions

1. Select cling peaches, peel them, cut in half, and remove the kernels.
2. Weigh the peaches and measure an equal weight of sugar.
3. Layer the peaches and sugar in a container, making each layer of peaches about six inches deep, alternating with sugar layers until all peaches are covered.
4. Let them rest for one day and night.
5. The next day, take the sugar and juice that has accumulated from the peaches and put it on to boil.
6. When it comes to a boil, add the first batch of peaches to the syrup and let them boil for ten minutes.
7. Remove the peaches and set aside to cool, then add the next batch of peaches to the syrup for ten minutes.
8. Once the first lot has cooled, return it to the syrup.
9. Continue this process, boiling each batch for ten minutes at a time, until the peaches are preserved (they are done when they have the color of a gold coin).
10. While cooking, continuously skim off the froth from the top of the syrup.
11. When the peaches are cold, transfer them to jars and cover with the syrup they were preserved in (making additional syrup if needed).
12. Seal or cork the jars and store in a dark closet.