Home › Canning Fruits › Canned Pears
Canned Pears
Prepare and can precisely like peaches in preceding recipe, except that they require longer cooking. When done they are easily pierced with a silver fork.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone method: it sends the reader back to the preceding peach recipe and adds only that pears need longer at the fire. It also describes the open-kettle style of canning, which current food-preservation guidance no longer accepts.
- No processing time or temperature anywhereThe instruction gives no boiling time, no jar processing, and no headspace, only the doneness cue of a fork sliding in easily. Modern canning safety rests entirely on a measured process time at a known temperature for a known jar size, and this entry supplies none of it.
- Open-kettle canning is obsoleteNineteenth-century practice cooked the fruit, ladled it hot into jars, and sealed immediately, trusting the heat of the contents to sterilise the jar and pull a vacuum. Seals formed this way fail unpredictably, and any mould or yeast introduced during the transfer has a sugar syrup to grow in. A boiling-water process after filling is what replaced it.
- Pears are not uniformly high-acidEuropean dessert pears such as Bartlett sit around pH 3.8 to 4.0 and behave as an acid food, but Asian pears run substantially less acidic and current guidance requires added bottled lemon juice for them. The recipe makes no distinction between varieties.
- Period closures no longer existThe jars behind this recipe sealed with a zinc cap over a rubber ring, or with wax and a bladder. Those closures cannot be evaluated for a proper vacuum the way a modern two-piece lid can, and the rubber rings degraded with reuse.
- Why a silver forkProbably not mere fussiness: tinned or iron kitchen forks were liable to react with acid fruit, discolouring it and leaving a metallic taste, which is the usual explanation offered for specifying silver. It reads as a window into period equipment rather than a food-safety measure.
- If you want canned pearsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify syrup strength, headspace, jar size and a boiling-water process time. Treat this entry as a document of how the work was done in the 1870s.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, a moment when glass fruit jars with reusable metal closures had become cheap enough for ordinary households and home canning was becoming an autumn routine. The book's canning section is written in exactly this compressed, cross-referencing style because its readers already knew the motions: the entry for pears needs only to say that they are firmer than peaches and take longer to soften. Pears kept poorly in the cellar compared with apples, bruising and going mealy or gritty at the core, and much of the crop was preserved or dried. The silver-fork test recurs in printed recipes for years afterwards, a reminder that a cook's tools were also part of the chemistry of the dish long before anyone wrote about pH.