Skip to main content
Dessert

Peach Butter

A sweet preserve made from ripe peaches, sugar, and spices.

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

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 ↓

Peach Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel, pit, and cook the peaches with as little water as possible until soft.

  2. Rub the cooked peaches through a colander to obtain the pulp.

Cook the butter

  1. For each quart of pulp, add 1½ cups of granulated sugar.

  2. Boil gently for one hour, stirring almost constantly.

  3. Season with cloves, cinnamon, and allspice if desired.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  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 pulp that cooks down into the thick, spreadable body of the butter.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the butter as water evaporates during long cooking.

The step that matters

Stirring during the long boil. Sugar-rich fruit pulp scorches easily on the bottom of the pan during the hour of gentle boiling. Frequent stirring keeps the sugars from burning and the pulp from sticking, so the butter cooks evenly and darkens gradually instead of turning bitter.

Swap the peach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, cinnamon, allspice. 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.

You might also like

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