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Dessert

Peach Leather

A preserved fruit product made by stewing peaches, mashing them with sugar, drying, and rolling into leather-like sheets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 860 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Peach Leather

Ingredients

Directions

Make the peach paste

  1. Stew the peaches until soft, mashing them smooth while cooking.

  2. Add ¼ pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

Dry and store

  1. Once thick enough, spread the mixture in a thin layer on a butter-greased board.

  2. Set the board out in the sun to dry.

  3. When dry, roll it up like leather and wrap in cloth for storage.

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 + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Peaches
Provide the fruit base whose pectin and pulp set into a firm, chewy sheet as it dries.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the pulp while helping preserve the dried fruit.

The step that matters

Cooking the peach mixture until thick enough. Cooking drives off water and concentrates the pectin and sugar. If the mixture is too wet, the layer will stay sticky and take too long to dry; if overcooked, it becomes too stiff to spread thinly.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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