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Pears, Jargonelle, Preserved
Gather the pears before they are soft, weigh them, and pare them as thinly as possible. As the fruit is likely to keep longer if the seeds are removed, scoop these out from the end with a fruit-knife, or with a bodkin. Place the pears in a preserving-pan, cover them with a thin syrup made with half a pound of sugar to each pint of water, and let them simmer gently until they are sufficiently tender to be pierced easily with a needle, but they must not be allowed to break. Turn them into a bowl, pour the syrup over them, and leave them to soak for two days. Drain off the syrup, and add to it a further quantity of sugar--so that there will be the same weight of sugar that there was of fruit in the first instance--together with half an ounce of whole ginger and the juice and thinly-pared rind of a lemon to each quart of syrup. Boil for ten minutes, and skim carefully. Put in the pears, and let them simmer gently until they look clear. When they are done enough they may either be drained from the syrup, and dried in the sun or in a gentle oven, or they may be kept in the syrup, and dried or not as they are wanted. Probable cost of pears, 2d. each.
A two-stage sugar preserve: a light syrup first to firm and sweeten the fruit without collapsing it, then a heavy syrup to finish. The whole method depends on keeping the pears just short of falling apart.
- The hinge: pick them hardJargonelles and their modern equivalents go from firm to mealy in a couple of days. Use pears that are still resistant at the neck; anything ripe enough to eat raw will break up in the pan and cloud the syrup.
- Weigh before paringThe instruction to weigh first is not incidental. The final sugar is matched to that original weight, so record it before the peel and cores come off.
- The two syrupsThe first is thin: 8 oz sugar to each 20 fl oz (1 imperial pint) of water. The second is made by returning the drained syrup to the pan and adding sugar until the total sugar used equals the starting weight of the fruit. A quart here is 40 fl oz.
- A bodkinA blunt, thick needle used in sewing. A narrow melon baller, an apple corer worked from the blossom end, or a small paring knife will core the pears from below while leaving the stalk end intact.
- Whole gingerHalf an ounce is roughly 15 g of dried root ginger, bruised, not ground. Fresh ginger can be substituted but gives a hotter, less resinous flavour and should be sliced thick so it can be lifted out.
- Testing with a needleA fine skewer should pass through without forcing. If the fruit offers no resistance at all it is close to breaking up, which the recipe warns against.
- Drying in a gentle ovenAround 200-225F (95-110C) with the door propped, on racks, for several hours until the surface is tacky rather than wet. This gives candied pears; left in the syrup they stay as a wet preserve.
- StorageThis is a high-sugar preserve, but the book gives no sealing or processing method. Pack hot into sterilised jars and either water-bath process to a current tested schedule or keep the jars refrigerated and use them within a few weeks.
The jargonelle is one of the oldest named pears in English gardens, an early summer variety that ripens in July or August and is notorious for going soft and woolly within days of picking. The name is French, generally traced to a diminutive suggesting a small or trifling pear, and confusingly the fruit the English called jargonelle is not the one French growers meant by the word. A pear that will not keep is a pear that has to be dealt with at once, which is why it turns up in the preserving pages rather than the dessert ones. Cassell's habit of closing an entry with a "probable cost" -- here tuppence a pear -- was aimed at the household manager costing out a week's work, and it dates the book firmly to a period when fruit was bought by the piece and preserving was the ordinary answer to a glut.