When you're making preserves, fully 50 percent of your success is in the shopping—good fruit makes good jam. Technique matters also, and a sound recipe makes a difference. But the crucial remaining factor is organization. Especially when dealing with a large quantity of perishable fruits or vegetables, you have to think through your strategy and plot out your work. If you can't get everything put up immediately, you have to take into account how the produce will ripen—and soon fade—as it waits for you.
My strategy for how to use a bushel of peaches would look something like this:
First day/underripe fruit: Pectin levels peak just before ripening, so I'd start with peach jelly. If you don't want to make jelly, give the peaches another day to ripen.
First day/just-ripe fruit: Peaches that are fragrant and slightly yielding but still firm enough to handle are ideal for canning in syrup, as either halves or slices in syrup.
Second day/fully ripe fruit: As the peaches become tender and fragrant, make jam.
Third day/dead-ripe fruit: By now, the peaches will likely have a few brown spots that will need to be cut away, so I'd work up a batch of chutney, which requires long, slow cooking that breaks down the fruit anyway.
Fourth day/tired fruit: Whatever peaches haven't been used by now will likely look a little sad, but even really soft, spotty ones can be trimmed for a batch of spiced peach butter.
Southern peach chutney evolved from an Indian relish called chatni that British colonials brought home during the days when the sun never set on the Empire. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, chatni is made fresh before a meal by grinding spices and adding them to a paste of tamarind, garlic, and limes or coconut. Pieces of fruit or vegetable may be incorporated, but the chief flavor characteristic is sour. The British turned that into a fruit preserve, explains the Oxford Companion: British chutneys are usually spiced, sweet, fruit pickles, having something of the consistency of jam. Highest esteem is accorded to mango chutney… .
Chutney later spread across the Atlantic to the West Indies and the American South, where the esteemed mango was replaced by the honorable peach.
