Skip to main content
Dessert

Peaches Dried

Peaches are boiled, sugared, and dried by repeated heating and turning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Peach and ginger work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 218 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Peaches Dried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and stone the peaches.

  2. Boil the peaches in water until tender, then drain them.

Candy the peaches

  1. Weigh the peaches and cover them with an equal weight of sugar in the saucepan.

  2. Let them sit for 2‑3 hours, then boil until clear and the syrup thickens.

  3. Cover and let stand overnight, then heat again until thoroughly hot for three days.

Dry

  1. Lay the peaches on plates and turn them daily until dry.

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 + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together218 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 is softened, sweetened and dried into the finished product.
Sugar
Soaks into the fruit, sweetening it and drawing out moisture so it keeps as it dries.

The step that matters

Boiling the peaches in sugar syrup until clear. Sugar must thicken the syrup and penetrate the fruit gradually. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the peaches tough, cloudy or unevenly candied, so the repeated sugar heating is what preserves the fruit.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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 dried peaches recipes

Stewed 4with Sugar 3 See all 26 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesPeach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipes