Skip to main content
Dessert

Peach Butter

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

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

Why it works: Peach and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 280 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Peach Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the peaches until soft.

  2. Add half of the sugar and boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Add the remaining sugar and boil for an additional 1.5 hours.

  4. Season with cloves.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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 base and pectin-rich pulp that thickens into a spreadable butter as it cooks down.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates during long boiling, helps the butter thicken and keep its texture.

The step that matters

Long boiling after adding the remaining sugar. The mixture must cook down slowly for 1.5 hours so water evaporates and the fruit thickens. Stopping early leaves it runny, while the sugar can scorch if it sticks to the bottom of the pot.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Peach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipesPeach FrittersPeach Fritters55 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesPeach MeringuePeach Meringue40 recipes