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Pickled Peaches

A pickled preserve made by cooking peaches in a sugar and vinegar syrup with cloves, cinnamon, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup with sugar and a little water.

  2. Boil the syrup down until thick.

Cook the peaches

  1. Add peaches a few at a time and cook until tender but not too soft.

  2. Carefully remove peaches and place them in a jar.

Pickle and seal

  1. Add cider vinegar, cloves, cinnamon, and mace to the syrup and pour it hot over the peaches.

  2. Seal the jar tightly.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Peach + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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 becomes tender and absorbs the spiced syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, once boiled down, thickens it and helps preserve the fruit.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickling liquid its tang and helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the syrup that carries into the peaches.

The step that matters

Cook the peaches until tender but not too soft. Peaches that are overcooked lose their shape and turn mushy, while underdone fruit stays firm and does not absorb the syrup well. Removing them gently keeps them whole.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar, cider, vinegar, clove, cinnamon. 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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