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Brandy Peaches

Preserved peaches soaked in brandy and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Brandy Peaches

Why it works: Peach and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 339 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Brandy Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the peaches

  1. Make a hot lye of ashes and water.

  2. Submerge a few peaches at a time for about 1.5 minutes until the skin rubs off easily.

  3. Remove peaches and place them in a vessel of cold water.

  4. Rub off the skins with a cloth and transfer them to another vessel of cold water.

Make the syrup and brandy

  1. Prepare a syrup with ½ pound of sugar and 1 pound of water, cooking it as for preserves.

  2. Add the peaches to the syrup and boil until tender enough to pierce with a straw.

  3. Remove the peaches and add 1 quart of the best white brandy to each pint of syrup.

  4. Once the fruit is cool, pack it into jars, leaving room for the syrup to prevent loss of shape.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together339 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

White cling-stone peaches
Provide the fruit that softens in syrup and holds its shape when packed.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and adds body to the preserving liquid.
White brandy
Adds aroma and alcohol that help preserve the fruit in the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the peaches until tender, not falling apart. Boiling too hard or too long breaks down the fruit's pectin and cell walls, so the peaches turn mushy and lose their shape in the jars. Testing for tenderness with a straw lets the cook stop at the right point.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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