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Pear Pickles
Prepare syrup as for peaches, pare and cut fruit in halves, or quarters if very large, and if small leave whole, put syrup in porcelain kettle, and when it boils put in fruit, cook until a silver fork will easily pierce them; skim out fruit first and place in jar, and last pour over syrup boiling hot; spice like peach pickles, draining them each day, boiling and skimming the syrup, and pouring it boiling hot over the fruit until fully done. By cooking pears so much longer at first they do not need to be boiled so frequently, but they must be watched carefully until finished, and if perfectly done, will keep two or more years. Apple pickles may be made in the same way, taking care to select such as will not lose shape in boiling.
This is an open-kettle preserving method with no measured ingredients at all, and it directs the reader to store the result for two years. It is worth reading for what it shows about nineteenth-century fruit preserving, but a tested modern sweet-pickle recipe should be used if you actually want to put up pears.
- No quantities anywhereThe whole formula is delegated to another page — "prepare syrup as for peaches," "spice like peach pickles." Without a stated vinegar-to-sugar ratio there is no way to know the finished acidity, and acidity is the only thing standing between a jar of spiced pears and spoilage.
- Open-kettle filling is obsoleteHot fruit into a jar, boiling syrup poured over, lid on: that was standard practice into the twentieth century and is no longer considered a seal. The headspace is not sterilised, no vacuum is reliably formed, and nothing is heat-processed after the jar is closed. Current practice is a measured boiling-water bath for a stated time.
- The repeated draining is the risk pointFruit sits in the jar while the syrup is drawn off, boiled and returned each day until the recipe judges it done. That drill helps thicken the syrup by evaporation, but it also means repeated handling at room temperature with the surface exposed — the exact conditions the method was meant to defeat.
- "Two or more years" is not a shelf lifeEven correctly processed high-acid fruit is generally reckoned at about a year for best quality. A two-year claim on an unprocessed jar tells you the standard being applied was "has not visibly spoiled," which is not a standard.
- Porcelain kettleThis means enamelled cast iron or enamelware, specified because vinegar and fruit acids pit bare iron and copper and pick up a metallic taste. Enamel or stainless is still the right choice for anything acidic.
- "Silver fork will easily pierce them"Silver, being relatively non-reactive compared with the iron and steel of the kitchen, turns up often in period preserving instructions as a doneness test. The test itself — fruit yielding without collapsing — is sound; the metal is incidental.
- The pears themselvesSweet pickling suited hard cooking pears such as Seckels, which hold their shape through long boiling, though this recipe names no variety. The closing note about choosing apples that "will not lose shape" is the same instruction applied to another fruit: soft dessert varieties cook down to sauce.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) includes sweet pickles, and their presence says a good deal about a household that had to eat through autumn's fruit for the rest of the year. Sweet pickling egfruit held in a syrup of vinegar, sugar and warm spices, commonly cinnamon, clove and mace egsits between preserve and condiment, and its ancestry is generally traced to the spiced vinegar fruits of medieval and early modern European cookery, which reached American kitchens through English practice. Seckel pears, small, firm and slow to break down, were one common subject, and apples the thrifty substitute named at the end here. The repeated boiling of the syrup over successive days was standard technique before reliable canning equipment: each round drove off water, concentrated the sugar, and inched the fruit toward a preservation that depended entirely on the cook's judgement rather than on any measured process.