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Dessert

To Can Peaches

Peaches are halved, sugared, packed in jars, and sealed with a rosin and suet cement before being boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,308 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Can Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Halve and peel the peaches, then lay them on a large dish.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar over the peaches and let them sit in a cool place overnight.

  3. Fit the peaches into jars, draining off the juice.

Process and seal

  1. Place the jars in a kettle of cold water with a towel underneath to prevent cracking.

  2. Heat the water gradually until it boils.

  3. Prepare syrup from the peach juice.

  4. Fill the jars with the syrup.

  5. Let air bubbles escape.

  6. Seal the jars.

  7. Place them in a pan of hot water to cool gradually.

Make the cement and covers

  1. For jars without tight covers, mix rosin and mutton suet to create a cement.

  2. Cut muslin large enough to cover the jar mouths.

  3. Spread the cement on the muslin.

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

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

  2. Peach + muttontop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + muttontop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together726 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit that is preserved and sweetened in the jars.
Sugar
Sweetens the peaches and draws out juice that forms the syrup.
Rosin
Hardens with mutton suet to form a cement that seals jar covers.
Mutton suet
Softens the rosin so the cement stays workable and adheres to muslin.

The step that matters

Placing the jars in cold water with a towel underneath. The towel keeps jars from touching the hot kettle base, which would cause sudden temperature change and cracking. Heating the water gradually also limits thermal shock to the glass.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, mutton. 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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