Preserved Peaches

History

This is recipe No. 132, "Preserved Peaches," in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881) — one of two preserved-peach recipes Abby Fisher gives, the other appearing earlier as No. 93. She is emphatic about the fruit: "Always preserve the cling peach and none other." The peaches are cut in two or four pieces, weighed pound for pound against granulated sugar, and left under sugar overnight. The next day the juice is poured off and boiled, the peaches returned to it for five minutes, lifted onto a dish to rest five minutes, then returned to the boiling syrup again — a cycle repeated until they are done.

Peaches run through this book more than any other fruit: besides these two preserves there is peach pie, sweet pickle peach, two versions of brandy peaches, peach marmalade, and peach cobbler. The culinary historian Robert W. Brower, tracing Fisher's roots, treated that abundance as evidence — noting the vicinity of 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" but belongs to the state's middle country.

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 could neither read nor write, dictated the book from "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years," and won two medals at the 1880 San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair — one for best assortment of jellies and preserves — and a diploma at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair.

Beyond that, the record documents no specific earlier origin for this particular method; it is Fisher's own.

Ingredients

• 1 pound cling peaches
• 1 pound granulated sugar

Instructions

1. Select cling peaches only and cut them into two or four pieces as desired.
2. Weigh the peaches and measure out an equal weight of granulated sugar.
3. Place the sugar on the peaches and let them sit overnight.
4. The next day, pour off the juice that has accumulated from the peaches and place it on the fire to boil.
5. Once the juice boils, add the peaches to the boiling syrup and let them remain for five minutes.
6. Remove the peaches and lay them on a dish for five minutes to rest.
7. Return the peaches to the boiling syrup for another five minutes.
8. Continue this cycle of removing for five minutes and returning to the boiling syrup for five minutes for one hour total.
9. After one hour of alternating, the peaches will be preserved.