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Dessert

Spiced Peaches

A preserve of ripe peaches cooked with sugar, vinegar, cloves, mace, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Spiced Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Rub the peaches with a coarse towel and halve them.

Make the syrup

  1. In a kettle, combine sugar, vinegar, cloves, mace, and cinnamon.

  2. Heat until a syrup forms.

Cook and finish

  1. Add peaches a few at a time to keep them whole.

  2. Once the peaches are clear, remove them.

  3. Add more peaches until all are cooked.

  4. Boil the syrup until it is rich.

  5. Pour the syrup over the peaches.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit body and flavor that the preserves are built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as it thickens, helps set the syrup and preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and sharpens the spiced syrup.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm aroma and flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Add peaches a few at a time. Adding too many peaches at once drops the syrup's temperature and makes the fruit boil unevenly and break apart. Small batches let the syrup return to a boil quickly, so the peaches cook through while staying whole.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

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