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East India Preserves or Pear Chips
Cut four pounds of pears in small pieces; pare and slice two ounces green ginger; chip the outside of one lemon into small bits together with the pulp of three lemons; three pounds of sugar, half cup of water. Cook gently for two hours or until clear. Put up in jelly glasses or jars.
— Mrs. B. F. Conkling
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A high-sugar pear preserve of the old "chip" type — fruit cut small so it candies into translucent shreds rather than collapsing into jam. The original assumes you know how to fill and seal glasses, so that is the main gap to fill.
- The hinge: cook to clear, not to the clockTwo hours is a guide, not a rule. The preserve is done when the pear pieces have gone translucent and the syrup sheets off a spoon at about 220F; on a modern burner with a wide pan it may well be ready before two hours are up, and overcooking turns the syrup to hard candy once cold.
- Green gingerThis is fresh ginger root, not preserved or crystallized. Two ounces is a piece several inches long, depending on how thick it is; peel it and slice it thin so it perfumes the syrup without leaving fibrous chunks.
- "Chip the outside of one lemon"Pare the zest in strips with no white pith and cut it into fine shreds. The pulp of three lemons means the flesh and juice, seeds and membrane discarded — it supplies most of the acid in the pot, which the pears themselves are short of.
- PearsFirm, slightly underripe Bosc or Bartlett work best. The recipe does not say whether the four pounds is weighed before or after paring; if you peel and core, expect to lose roughly a quarter of the weight. Fully ripe pears give up too much water and go to mush before they clarify.
- The panUse a wide, heavy non-reactive pan — stainless or enameled, not bare aluminum or cast iron, which react with the lemon acid. Half a cup of water is all the liquid the recipe allows, so low heat and frequent stirring for the first fifteen minutes are essential until the sugar has drawn juice from the fruit.
- Sealing and keeping"Jelly glasses" in this period were sealed with paraffin wax, which is no longer considered reliable. Fill sterilized half-pint jars, leaving a quarter-inch of headspace, and either process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes or skip the canning and keep the jars refrigerated, where the sugar concentration will hold them for several months.
- YieldA large batch: three pounds of sugar and four pounds of fruit will fill considerably more than a few half-pint jars. It is a condiment rather than a jam: good with cold ham, sharp cheese, or curry.
"East India preserve" turns up in nineteenth-century American cookbooks attached to sweet fruit conserves flavoured with ginger and citrus, borrowed at a remove from the chutneys and ginger preserves that came into Britain and the United States through the East India trade. Imported Chinese and Indian ginger preserves arrived in stoneware jars and were expensive; a cook with a pear tree and a piece of fresh ginger root from the grocer could approximate the flavour for the cost of sugar. The attribution to a named contributor is typical of community cookbooks of this kind, where each receipt carried its contributor's name as both credit and warranty.