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Pear Marmalade
Weigh, pare, halve, and core as many ripe mellow pears as it is desired to use. Put them into a preserving-pan, barely cover them with cold water, and simmer gently until they are tender. Lift them out of the water, and boil the liquid for an hour with the skins and cores of the pears. Strain it, make a syrup of it by boiling a pound and a half of sugar and a quart of liquid for every two pounds of fruit, and let this syrup boil until it will stiffen, when a small quantity is poured upon a plate. Stir the pears into the syrup, and boil all together for a few minutes. Turn the marmalade into jars, cover in the usual way, and store in a cool, dry place. Time, boil the pears until tender; one hour to stew the skins, etc.; boil the syrup until it jellies. Probable cost, 9d. per pound.
A two-stage preserve: the pears are poached, then their peel and cores are boiled down to extract pectin for the syrup. The whole thing hinges on that second boil, so do not throw the trimmings away.
- Do the arithmetic firstThe proportions are 1 1/2 lb sugar and 1 quart of the strained liquid for every 2 lb of pears. Note that the recipe lists weighing first, before paring and coring.
- Why the skins matterPear flesh is relatively low in pectin; the peel and cores hold more of it. The hour-long boil is largely an extraction, and skipping it risks a syrup that will not set properly.
- Lemon helpsPears are also low in acid, which pectin needs in order to gel. The juice of a lemon per 2 lb of fruit, added to the syrup, is a common modern aid to the set, though it is not in the original.
- Ripe but not soft"Ripe mellow" here means fragrant and fully flavoured, not collapsing. Fruit that is overripe has already lost pectin and will poach to mush during the first simmer.
- The plate test"Until it will stiffen when a small quantity is poured upon a plate" is the cold-saucer test. Keep two small plates in the freezer, drop on a teaspoon of syrup, wait half a minute, and push it with a finger; it should wrinkle. On a thermometer this is around 220F.
- Only a few minutes at the endOnce the pears go back in, long boiling breaks them up and dulls the colour. The syrup has already been brought to setting point; the last stage is just to heat the fruit through.
- "Cover in the usual way"In Victorian practice that meant a disc of waxed paper on the hot surface and a tied-down cover of parchment or bladder. Today: hot sterilised jars, new two-piece lids, and a boiling-water bath of 10 minutes for shelf storage. Uncanned jars keep in the refrigerator for a few weeks.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives no yield; the syrup is reduced to setting point before the fruit goes back in, so expect appreciably less than the combined weight of fruit, sugar and liquid. The 9d. per pound is the book's own estimated cost of making.
"Marmalade" here carries its older, broader sense of any fruit boiled to a thick preserve; the word comes through French and Portuguese marmelo, quince, and English cooks used it for quince, apple and pear pastes long before the meaning narrowed to the bitter-orange version, a shift often traced to Scottish cooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries though English orange marmalade recipes predate them. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and 80s, is full of these thrifty autumn preserves, and the trick of boiling the peel and cores for their setting power was standard kitchen economy in an age before packaged pectin, which only reached domestic cooks in the early twentieth century. The costing in pence per pound at the end of each entry was the book's characteristic touch, aimed squarely at a mistress keeping accounts.