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Pear Preserves
Pare, cut in halves, core and weigh (if hard, boil in water until tender, and use the water for the syrup), allow three-quarters pound sugar for each pound fruit, boil a few moments, skim, and cool; when luke-warm add pears, and boil gently until syrup has penetrated them and they look clear; some of the pieces will cook before the rest, and must be removed; when done, take out, boil down syrup a little and pour over them; a few cloves stuck here and there in the pears add a pleasant flavor. Put in small jars with glass or tin tops, and seal with putty. - Miss Florence Williams.
A plain nineteenth-century sugar-weight preserve: the pears are cooked in a syrup made at three parts sugar to four parts fruit, by weight, until they turn translucent. Everything hinges on the slow, gentle boil and on pulling pieces out as they finish.
- The hinge: add pears to lukewarm syrupDropping raw pears into boiling syrup shocks the outside and toughens it while the center stays raw. Boiling the syrup, skimming, then cooling it to lukewarm before adding the fruit lets sugar move inward slowly, which is what produces the clear, glassy pieces the recipe asks for.
- Weigh, do not measure"Three-quarters pound sugar for each pound fruit" is by weight after paring and coring — roughly 340 g sugar per 450 g prepared pears. A scale is not optional here; volume measures of cut fruit vary too much to hold the ratio.
- Choice of pearFirm, slightly underripe fruit is what this method wants — Bosc, Kieffer, Seckel or any hard cooking pear. The parenthetical "if hard, boil in water until tender" is a pre-cooking step for very firm varieties, and that cooking water becomes the syrup base so nothing is wasted. Fully ripe Bartletts will collapse into sauce.
- Pull pieces as they clearUneven ripeness means uneven cooking, and the recipe's instruction to remove finished pieces is the difference between whole halves and mush. No time is given: simmer gently and lift out each half as it goes translucent.
- Reducing the syrup"Boil down a little" means a short reduction only, until the syrup thickens slightly and a spoonful sheets rather than runs. Overshooting gives a syrup that sets hard and candied around the fruit.
- ClovesWhole cloves stuck into the halves are potent; two or three per pound of fruit is plenty, and they should be counted going in so they can be found again. A strip of lemon peel or a piece of split vanilla bean does similar work more gently.
- Do not seal with puttyPutty-sealed jars with glass or tin tops are obsolete and cannot be relied on for an airtight, food-safe seal. If the preserve is to be stored on a shelf rather than in the refrigerator, follow a current tested canning procedure for pear preserves and its processing times.
Buckeye Cookery (published in Ohio in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, a revised and enlarged version of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book) reflects a moment when a hard-fleshed pear was a household staple rather than a dessert fruit. Varieties like the Kieffer, widely planted in the United States in the later nineteenth century, were gritty and nearly inedible raw but held their shape beautifully in syrup, and preserving was the main way a farm household turned a heavy autumn crop into something that lasted the winter. The three-quarters-pound-per-pound sugar ratio is doing preservation work, not just sweetening: at that concentration sugar ties up enough water to discourage spoilage, which is why so many recipes of the period specify weight rather than taste. The attribution to Miss Florence Williams is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named local women — a community cookbook in the form that became the American standard.