Skip to main content
Dessert

Rickled Peaches

A pickled peach preserve made with cider vinegar, water, cinnamon, cloves, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Rickled Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald the peaches to easily remove the skins.

  2. In a pot, combine cider vinegar, water, cinnamon, and cloves.

  3. Sweeten the mixture to taste and bring to a boil.

Cook and pickle

  1. Cook the peaches in the syrup until tender, then remove them.

  2. Boil the syrup for 30 minutes.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the peaches in jars and seal.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Peaches
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and absorbs the spiced, tangy syrup.
Sharp cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that gives the pickling syrup its tang and sharpness.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup to balance the acidity of the vinegar.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic flavor to the syrup.
Whole cloves
Adds warm, pungent aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook the peaches until tender, then remove them. Peaches must be cooked just until tender; overcooking turns them mushy and falls apart, while undercooking leaves them firm and less able to absorb the syrup's flavor.

Swap the peach

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

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

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

More pickled peaches recipes

Sweet 47Spiced 3 See all 189 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesPeach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipesPeach FrittersPeach Fritters55 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipes