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Pickled Peaches

A pickled peach preserve made with sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining 1 quart of vinegar and 3 pounds of sugar in a pot.

  2. Peel the peaches and add them to the vinegar mixture.

  3. Bring the mixture to a gentle boil for a short time.

Simmer the spiced syrup

  1. Remove the peaches and let the vinegar boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Add cinnamon, cloves, and allspice to the vinegar while it boils.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Peach + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup and helps preserve the peaches.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the peaches.
Peaches
Supply the fruit that softens in the syrup and absorbs its sweet, sour, and spiced flavors.

The step that matters

Removing the peaches before the long boil. The peaches are added to the syrup only briefly and then removed, so the vinegar can boil for 30 minutes without overcooking the fruit. Boiling the fruit for that long would make it mushy and cause it to lose its shape.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice. 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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