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PEARS STEWED IN VINEGAR (for Dessert)
Pare smoothly two pounds of small winter pears, cut them in halves, and take out the cores. Boil a pint of vinegar, twelve cloves, twelve ounces of sugar, and a stick of cinnamon for ten minutes. Put the pears into the syrup, and let them simmer very gently until they are sufficiently tender to be pierced easily with a pin. Take them out carefully, drain them, and put them into jars. Boil the syrup quickly until it is quite thick, and when it is cold pour it over the fruit, which must be covered with it. Tie down the jars with bladder, and store in a cool dry place. Time to stew the pears, until tender; the time will vary with the quality of the pears. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A sweet-sour pickled pear, meant to be spooned out of the jar alongside dessert or cold meat. The measurements are sound; the storage method is the part that has not survived.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups of vinegar. Twelve ounces of sugar is roughly 1 3/4 cups granulated.
- Vinegar strengthVictorian household vinegar was typically malt or cider vinegar, of no guaranteed strength but broadly comparable to today's supermarket cider vinegar. White wine vinegar works and keeps the colour clearer; do not use anything labelled as reduced-acidity or a seasoned rice vinegar, since the acid is doing the preserving.
- "Small winter pears"These are hard, late-season cooking pears — Seckel, Forelle, small Bosc, or the old stewing varieties. Ripe Bartlett or Comice will collapse into the syrup. If the pears yield to a thumb at the neck, they are too soft for this.
- The pin test is the hingeSimmer barely at a tremble, and start testing early. A pin should slide in with slight resistance, not fall through. The pears go on softening in the hot syrup after they come out, and overcooked halves will not hold their shape in the jar.
- Reducing the syrupBoiling the drained syrup "quite thick" means down to a light honey consistency that coats a spoon — roughly a third to a half of its volume. Pouring it on cold, as instructed, keeps the fruit firm, but it also means nothing in the jar is ever hot.
- Bladder and storageBladder tied over the jar mouth was one of the common coverings used before screw caps, though far from a reliable airtight seal; a modern lidded preserving jar replaces it. Because the syrup goes on cold and the jars are never processed, treat this as a refrigerator pickle rather than a shelf-stable preserve: cool storage in the fridge, eaten within a month or so, and discarded at any sign of mould or fermentation.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of pears fills roughly one 1-quart jar or two pint jars. Serve a few halves with their syrup as part of a dessert course, with cream or a plain sponge, or against cold ham, game or hard cheese.
Fruit stewed in a vinegar-and-sugar syrup sits on the line between dessert and condiment, which is exactly where much nineteenth-century English cookery kept it: Cassell's files this among sweet dishes, yet the cloves and cinnamon and the sharp syrup are the same seasoning that went into pickled walnuts and spiced damsons for the cold meat table. The technique is older than the book by centuries — one of several ways of holding hard autumn fruit through the winter before reliable bottling, alongside drying, sugar preserves and cellaring — and hard "stewing pears" are often said to have been valued less for eating raw than for their behaviour after long cooking. The costing of 1s 3d is a reminder of what this dictionary was for: a middle-class household with a cook, budgeting a dessert to the penny, and a cool dry larder to store it in.