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Dessert

Peach Butter

A sweet preserve made from ripe peaches, sugar, and optional lemon juice, cooked until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Dip peaches in boiling water for a few seconds until the skin slips, then transfer the peaches to cold water.

  2. Peel and pit the peaches.

  3. Mash the pulp.

  4. Cook the pulp in its own juice without adding water.

  5. If the pulp is coarse, strain it through a colander or sieve.

Make the butter

  1. For each pound of pulp, add ½ pound of sugar.

  2. Cook slowly, stirring frequently until thickened.

  3. If using dried peaches, soak them for several hours, then cook them until tender.

  4. Add canned peaches and strain.

  5. Stir in 2½ pounds of sugar.

  6. Cook slowly for two hours until thickened.

  7. For the lemon juice variant, cook 15 pounds of sliced peaches in their juice for 45 minutes.

  8. Add 5 pounds of sugar and the lemon juice, then cook for an additional minute.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack while hot in sterilized jars.

  2. Cover with hot paraffin or sterilize like apple butter.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body and flavour of the butter.
Sugar
Sweetens the butter and, as it cooks down, helps thicken it into a spread.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet peach pulp.

The step that matters

Slow cooking until thickened. Cooking slowly and stirring often lets water evaporate gently, concentrating the pulp and sugar without scorching the bottom of the pot.

Swap the peach

The recipe marks peach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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