Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pears, Pickled
Pears, Pickled
Put three quarts of good vinegar into a tin saucepan with a dessert-spoonful of salt, twelve onions, and two dozen large baking pears which have been well rubbed with a soft cloth, but not pared. Simmer gently until the pears are tender without being broken, then take them out, and when they are cold pare and core them, and divide each one into six or eight pieces. When the onions also are soft take them out, and rub them through a fine hair sieve. Put into the vinegar a dessert-spoonful of pepper-corns, a small tea-spoonful of cloves, a small tea-spoonful of allspice, six blades of mace, two ounces of whole ginger, three dessert-spoonfuls of turmeric, two cloves of garlic; if liked, a dessert-spoonful of mustard-seed and a dessert-spoonful of coriander-seed may also be added. Let these ingredients boil for ten minutes, then stir in the mashed onion, and boil ten minutes longer. Put the pears into jars, and pour the seasoned vinegar over them. Divide the spices equally amongst the jars, and place them at the top of the pears. Tie the jars down with bladder, and store in a cool dry place. Time, about one hour and a half to stew the pears. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a gallon of pickle.
A vinegar pickle in the yellow, turmeric-heavy "Indian" style, built on hard cooking pears. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the vessels and coverings named have no modern equivalent, and the storage advice is the part that has changed most.
- Not a tin or aluminium panBoiling vinegar with spices will pit and discolour tinned, aluminium or bare copper pans and pick up a metallic taste. Use stainless steel or a well-glazed enamelled pot throughout, and a nylon or stainless sieve rather than the hair sieve for the onions.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. So the salt, peppercorns, mustard seed and coriander are 2 teaspoons each; the turmeric is 3 dessert-spoonfuls, about 2 tablespoons, which is what gives the pickle its strong yellow. If you cannot find blades of mace, ground mace will stand in, but conversions vary a good deal — start with about half a teaspoon and taste.
- The vinegar matters"Good vinegar" meant full-strength, undiluted vinegar, and in a pickle it is the acid that preserves the fruit. Use a 5 per cent acidity malt, cider or white wine vinegar and do not dilute or top up with water. Read as imperial measure, three quarts is about 3.4 litres (nearer 2.8 litres if taken as US quarts); the stated yield of a gallon of pickle will fill roughly four quart jars.
- Which pears"Baking pears" means a hard, gritty cooking variety that holds its shape for an hour and a half of simmering — Bosc, or true stewing pears if you can get them. Ripe dessert pears will collapse into pulp long before the time is up.
- Peeling cold, not hotThe pears go into the vinegar whole and unpeeled, and are pared and cored only once cold. The likely reasons are that the skin helps hold them together while they soften and that the flesh firms up as it cools; either way, follow the order given rather than peeling first.
- The onion puréeSieving the boiled onions back into the vinegar thickens the liquor slightly. It also makes the finished liquid cloudy, which is expected here.
- Bladder, and what to use insteadTying down with bladder was the standard pre-cellophane covering: a damp membrane that shrank tight as it dried. It is not an airtight seal. Use glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-coated lids, filling while the liquor is hot.
- StorageA "cool dry place" meant a larder several degrees colder than a modern kitchen, and the acidity of the vinegar was never measured. Keep these in the refrigerator, give them three or four weeks for the spices to come forward, and use within a few months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested pickling recipe with a measured water-bath process.
The spicing here — turmeric, whole ginger, mustard seed, coriander, garlic — places this in the family of British "Indian" pickles that grew out of East India Company trade and the anglicised achars and piccalillis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where turmeric did as much work colouring the brine as flavouring it. Pickled pears themselves are older and more domestic: hard stewing pears, the kind that are inedible raw, were a standard autumn crop in British gardens and orchards, and pickling was one of several ways to use them — alongside stewing, baking and perry — putting them on the table with cold beef, ham or a plain mutton joint. Cassell's gives the cost as 2s. 6d. for a gallon, which tells you the point of the exercise as clearly as the ingredients do: this is bulk larder work, made once a season and put by in jars sealed with bladder because that is what a household had before cellophane and screw bands.