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In that happy time excise was only a word in the dictionary, so the yield of certain trees, very free-bearing, of small, deep, red, clear-seed fruit, was allowed to get dead-ripe on the trees, then mashed to a pulp in the cider trough, and put into stands to ferment, then duly distilled.
Black Daddy tended the firing with a couple of active lads to cut and fetch wood, what time they were not fetching in great baskets of peaches. Yellow peaches, not too ripe but full flavored, made the lightest and sweetest dried fruit. And clingstones were ever so much better for drying than the clear-seed sorts.
The black people chose clear-seed peaches for their individual drying. They made merry over splitting the fruit, and placing it, sitting out in front of their cabins in the moonshine, or by torch-light. Washing was all they gave the peach outsides a little thing like a fuzzy rind their palates did not object to.
That was the charm of our seedlings which had further a distinction of flavor no commercial fruit ever yet owned. August peaches were for drying in September, early, came the Heaths, for preserves, brandy fruit, and so on. October peaches, nearly all clear-seed, made the finest peach butter. Understand, in those days, canning, known as "hermetic sealing," was still a laboratory process.
It was just as well, since clear-seed fruit, peeled, shrinks unconscionably to small scrawny knots, inclined to be sticky though it is but just to add, that in cooking, it comes back to almost its original succulence. When the peach-cutting was done, there was commonly a watermelon feast. Especially at Mammy's house Daddy's watermelons were famed throughout the county.
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