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Peach Butter

A preserve made by boiling peaches with cider and sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and cider work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 90 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Peach Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cider

  1. Reduce 1 gallon of sweet cider by boiling it until it is half its original quantity.

Make the butter

  1. Pare and cut the soft peaches.

  2. Put the peaches into a preserving kettle with the reduced cider.

  3. Boil the mixture until it reduces to a pulp, stirring constantly.

  4. If the mixture is not sweet enough, add a little sugar.

  5. Cover tightly in jars.

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 + cidertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  3. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit bulk and flavour that breaks down into the thick pulp of the butter.
Sweet cider
Reduced by boiling to concentrate its sugars and flavour, then cooked with the fruit into a spread.
Boiled cider
Adds concentrated sweetness and a deep, tangy apple flavour to the finished butter.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture reduces to a pulp. Stirring constantly keeps the thickening fruit from scorching on the bottom of the kettle, and cooking down concentrates the sugars and gives the spread its thick, spreadable body.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, 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.

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