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Pear Jam
Pare, core, and quarter six pounds of ripe mellow pears, put them into a jar, cover closely, and place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, which must be kept boiling until the pears are quite soft. Turn them into a preserving-pan, and mix with them a quart of syrup, made in the proportion of a pound and a half of loaf sugar to each half a pint of water. Mix the fruit and the syrup thoroughly, and stir the jam over the fire for twenty minutes. Turn it into jars, cover in the usual way, and store in a cool dry place. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
A two-stage Victorian jam: the pears are steamed soft in a covered jar before they ever meet sugar, then finished briefly in syrup. The method makes sense once you know pears toughen if sugared while raw.
- The hinge: soften firstSugar firms pectin-poor pear flesh and stops it breaking down, so the fruit must be genuinely tender before the syrup goes in. The covered jar standing in boiling water is a bain-marie — a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water, or a covered dish in a low oven, does the same job; cook until the fruit is quite soft, as the recipe directs.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; jam sugar with added pectin would change the character of the finished preserve.
- The syrup proportion is ambiguous"A pound and a half of loaf sugar to each half a pint of water" gives a very heavy syrup, and it is unclear whether the quart is measured before or after dissolving. Read as a quart of water it works out at about 6 lb of sugar to 6 lb of fruit; read as a quart of finished syrup it is nearer 2 to 2.5 lb. Modern jam recipes generally work to roughly equal weights of prepared fruit and sugar.
- Pears are low in acid and pectinThis is the fruit most likely to give you a syrupy jam that never sets. The juice of two lemons per 6 lb of fruit helps both the set and the keeping quality, and is standard in current pear preserve recipes.
- Twenty minutes is a starting pointCook until the jam reaches 220F on a sugar thermometer, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer. Depending on how juicy the pears are this may take longer than twenty minutes; stir throughout, as a heavy sugar syrup catches quickly.
- "Cover in the usual way"Victorian practice was a paper or waxed disc and a cool larder, which relies on sugar concentration alone to hold off mould. For anything you intend to keep at room temperature, follow a current tested water-bath process for pear preserves; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or freeze.
- Yield6 lb of fruit plus a quart of syrup will make well over 5 lb of jam, so the exact jar count is guesswork. The "probable cost" of 8d. per pound is the book's own period costing and has no modern meaning.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of British domestic preserving, when a suburban garden pear tree produced more fruit in a fortnight than a household could eat and sugar had become cheap enough to absorb the surplus — the sugar duties were fully repealed in 1874. Pears posed a particular problem: unlike currants, gooseberries or damsons they are low in both acid and pectin, so they were arguably more often bottled, dried or spiced than made into jam, and when they were jammed the cook seems generally to have relied on a very heavy syrup to do the preserving work that pectin does in other fruit. The gentle preliminary steaming in a closed jar is often likened to the technique Victorian kitchens used for stewing fruit for invalids, and it survives here because pears cooked hard in sugar stay stubbornly gritty and firm.