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Pears
Can soft pears in the same manner as peaches.
Hard pears should first be cooked tender in boiling water, then use this water as needed in making the syrup; finish either in saucepan or jars, as desired; in either case, but a few minutes of cooking are needed.
Pears No. 2 Cut a dozen Bartlett pears in halves, leaving the stems on one half, and remove the cores.
Make syrup of one cup and a half of sugar, a cup of water, and the juice of one lemon; skim, put in the pears, and cook until just tender. With a silver fork drop the pears into a sterilized quart jar set on a cloth in a pan of water; pour in syrup to fill the jar to overflow; adjust the rubber and the sterilized cover and tighten the jar. +
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit and syrup are ladled into jars, the lid is closed, and the jar is set aside to seal on its own. No processing time, no temperature, and no heat treatment after sealing appear anywhere in the text, and that is the reason the method was abandoned.
- Why the method failsThe jar is filled and closed with no boiling-water process afterwards, so nothing sterilises the headspace, the underside of the lid, or the rubber ring. Mould and yeast routinely survive there, and the seal that forms as the jar cools is unreliable and unverifiable.
- No process time is given at allModern pear canning is specified as a measured hot- or raw-pack with a stated minutes-at-a-boil figure adjusted for jar size and altitude. "But a few minutes of cooking are needed" and "cook until just tender" describe the fruit's texture, not the destruction of spoilage organisms. There is no way to infer a process from this text.
- The hard-pear instruction compounds the problemBoiling hard pears tender in water and then reusing that water as syrup, finishing "either in saucepan or jars, as desired," leaves the reader free to choose a route with no jar heating whatsoever. Use a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service instead.
- What "adjust the rubber" refers toThe jars intended here are lightning or zinc-cap jars sealed with a separate rubber gasket ring, tightened before cooling. Old gaskets perish with age, and today's two-piece lids seal by a different principle and cannot be substituted into this procedure.
- The silver forkSilver, or another tool that would not stain, was the usual specification in period books, iron and tinned forks being held to discolour pale fruit on contact. Stainless steel does the same job now.
Pears were among the most-canned fruits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, partly because they ripen off the tree and arrive at the kitchen in a manageable rush, and partly because their pale flesh took syrup and lemon well. The Bartlett named here is the American name for Williams' Bon Chretien, an English variety whose United States career is generally traced to Enoch Bartlett of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s; by the time books like this one were printed it was the leading canning pear of California and the Pacific Northwest. The recipe's confidence about sealing reflects the period's faith in the patent jar rather than any understanding of processing: measured boiling-water processing, altitude correction and the pH 4.6 dividing line came out of canning and botulism research over the following decades and reached home cooks largely through agricultural extension bulletins, and open-kettle canning was steadily written out of the advice as it went.