Skip to main content
Dessert

Peach Butter

Peach Butter is a sweet preserve made by cooking peaches with sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Peach Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the peach butter

  1. Peel the peaches and place them in a preserving kettle with enough water to cover them.

  2. Boil the peaches until soft, then strain through a colander to remove the stones.

  3. Add 1½ pounds of sugar for each quart of peaches and boil slowly for one hour, stirring often to prevent burning.

  4. Transfer the mixture to stone or glass jars and store in a cool place.

Make the dried peaches

  1. Prepare a syrup with sugar and a little water.

  2. Add the peaches a few at a time to the syrup and cook until clear.

  3. Carefully place the peaches on a dish and set them in the sun to dry.

  4. Sprinkle powdered sugar over the peaches gradually.

  5. If any syrup remains, transfer it to fresh dishes.

  6. Once dry, layer the peaches in a jar with a little sugar sifted between the layers.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe peaches
Provide the fruit, pectin and natural sugars that form the thick, spreadable body.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps thicken the butter as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Stirring during the one-hour boil. Sugar-rich fruit scorches easily on the bottom of the kettle as it thickens. Frequent stirring keeps heat even and prevents burning, which would give a bitter taste.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Peach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipesPeach FrittersPeach Fritters55 recipesPeach MeringuePeach Meringue40 recipesPeach IcePeach Ice16 recipes