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JARGONELLE PEARS, TO PRESERVE (another way)
Prepare the pears as in the last recipe. When they are pared, cored, and weighed, put them into a saucepan, with vine leaves under and over them; cover them with cold water, and simmer them gently for half an hour. Drain them, and make a syrup, allowing one pound of sugar to every pound of fruit, and half a pint of water to every pound and a half of sugar, with one ounce of ginger, and the rind and juice of half a lemon. Boil this syrup for ten minutes, put in the pears, and let them simmer a quarter of an hour. Lift them out carefully, boil the syrup ten minutes longer, and when cold pour it over the pears. Cover them closely, and in three days boil the syrup ten minutes again, and repeat this twice, three days being allowed to elapse between each boiling. The pears must be entirely covered with the syrup while they are soaking. Put a clove in each pear. Put the fruit in a deep jar, pour the syrup over it, cover closely to exclude the air, and keep in a cool, dry place. Probable cost of pears, 3d. per pound.
A long-form sugar preserve in the Victorian manner: the fruit is poached, then repeatedly steeped in a syrup that is boiled down every three days until it is thick enough to keep the pears. The whole cycle runs to about ten days, and almost all of that is waiting.
- The hinge: never boil the pears in the thickened syrupAfter the first fifteen-minute simmer, the pears are only ever soaked; it is the syrup that goes back on the heat. Boiling the fruit again at each stage collapses it into sauce, which is precisely what the three-day rests are designed to avoid.
- Vine leavesGrape leaves, laid under and over the fruit during the first poaching. They were a traditional trick for preserving or greening the colour of hard fruit. Brined vine leaves from a jar work, but rinse them well or the preserve turns salty; the step can be skipped without harming the result.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The syrup ratio works out at 1 lb sugar per 1 lb prepared fruit, with 10 fl oz water per 1½ lb of that sugar.
- An ounce of gingerMost likely whole dried root ginger rather than ground, though the recipe does not say, and gives no instruction for removing it; bruising it and tying it in muslin so it can be fished out is a modern convenience. An ounce is a generous amount and gives a distinctly hot preserve; halve it for a milder one.
- The clovesPushed into each pear at the end, after the fruit has finished cooking. One clove per pear is assertive on a small early pear, and they will keep releasing flavour for months in the jar.
- Jargonelles, and what to use insteadAn early, soft-fleshed summer pear now rarely sold. Choose any firm, slightly underripe cooking pear — Conference, Bosc, or a hard Bartlett — since a ripe dessert pear will disintegrate during the first half-hour simmer.
- Storage"Cover closely to exclude the air" in a deep jar is not a sealed process; the preserve relies on a near-saturated syrup and a cold larder. Keep yours in the refrigerator, or follow current tested guidance for water-bath processing pears in syrup if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon on roughly one 1-lb jar of drained fruit and syrup for every 1 lb of pared, cored fruit you start with.
The Jargonelle was one of the best-known English summer pears of the nineteenth century, ripening in July and going soft and mealy within days of picking — exactly the sort of glut fruit that had to be preserved or lost. Confusingly, the pear the English called Jargonelle was not the variety the French knew by that name. The method here, with its cycle of steeping and reboiling the syrup at three-day intervals, is the standard Victorian technique for firm-textured whole preserved fruit: each boiling drives off water and raises the sugar concentration a little further, drawing syrup into the fruit gradually rather than shocking it into pulp. The vine leaves are older still, a kitchen-garden trick generally traced to the practice of greening gooseberries and other hard fruit. Cassell's habit of quoting a probable cost — 3d. per pound — marks the book's audience: a household running to a cook, but one expected to account for what she spent.