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Jargonelle Pears, to Preserve
Gather the pears before they are fully ripe. Pare them as thinly as possible, cut out the black tops, and pick out the seeds. Weigh the fruit, and simmer it very gently until it is quite tender, but unbroken; then drain it, and make a syrup of one pound of sugar and half a pint of water to every pound of pears. Let this boil for five or six minutes, remove the scum as it rises, put in the pears and simmer them in the syrup five minutes longer. Lift out carefully, and put them to stand in a dish with the syrup, which must entirely cover them, for two days. Then put them again into the pan, and simmer them until they are clear, but they must not break; if a little lemon-rind is simmered with the syrup it will improve the flavour, and two or three drops of cochineal will improve the colour. Put the fruit into jars, pour the syrup over it, and cover securely. When wanted the pears may either be served in the syrup or dried in a cool oven. Time, three days. Probable cost, pears, 3d. per pound.
A three-day preserve in the old style: the fruit is poached, then steeped, then finished, so that whole pears take up sugar slowly and stay intact. Almost everything here depends on restraint at the stove.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: never let the fruit boil -- every stage involving the pears says simmer, and it means a bare tremble at the surface (the syrup alone is boiled, for five or six minutes, before the pears go in). A rolling boil bursts the flesh and turns whole pears into a coarse jam, which is the one outcome the method exists to avoid.
- The first simmerThe recipe does not say what to poach the pears in before the syrup is made. Use just enough water to cover, and stop the moment a skewer meets no resistance; underdone is recoverable, collapsed is not.
- Half a pintThis is an Imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. With one pound of sugar to a pound of fruit, expect a heavy syrup that thickens considerably when cold.
- Jargonelle pearsAn early summer variety, rarely sold now. Any firm, slightly underripe pear with a fine grain works; Bartlett/Williams picked hard, or Conference, both behave well.
- Black tops and seedsThe "black tops" are most likely the dried calyx at the blossom end. Cutting them out and coring from that end lets you keep the pear whole, though the recipe says nothing about how they were served.
- CochinealGenuine cochineal is carmine, made from the insect of that name; it is still sold as a food colour and is not vegan. Two or three drops is all that was ever intended, to lift the pears to a faint rose rather than to dye them.
- Cool oven for dryingThe book gives no temperatures; a cool oven would be a very low one, perhaps in the region of 200-225F (95-110C). Lift the pears from the syrup, drain, and give them several hours until tacky rather than wet.
- Storage"Cover securely" in this period typically implied no more than a paper or bladder cover tied over the jar in a cold larder, and such jars had to be watched for mould. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve and eat it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process for pears in syrup if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldTwo pounds of pears takes about the same weight of sugar, and will need rather more than two 1-pint jars once the syrup is poured over to cover.
The Jargonelle was one of the standard English summer pears of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an early, musky, quick-rotting fruit that had to be caught at the right hour or lost; the name is generally traced to French jargonelle, though the pear the French called by that name was a different and inferior one. A fruit that spoils within days of ripening is exactly the fruit a household preserves, and Cassell's answer is the classic slow-candying method: repeated gentle simmerings with a long rest between, so that sugar migrates into the flesh instead of drawing water out of it all at once and shrivelling the pear. The quoted price, threepence a pound, places this among the everyday preserves rather than the luxuries, and the closing note that the fruit may be "dried in a cool oven" is a reminder that in a Victorian kitchen a preserve and a sweetmeat were two stages of one process.--}</p>