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Ginger Pears
Four pounds very hard pears (chop not too fine), four pounds sugar, two ounces green ginger root, three lemons chopped fine; cook until transparent.
— Mrs. W. P. Bell
A one-to-one sugar conserve of the kind that fills the preserve pages of church and village cookbooks. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a finished preserve looks like, so the only real skill is judging the endpoint.
- The hinge: "until transparent"The fruit is done when the pieces turn translucent and the syrup sheets off a spoon rather than running in drops. On a thermometer that is around 220F at sea level. Expect 45 to 90 minutes of steady, uncovered simmering depending on how juicy the pears are.
- Green ginger root"Green" here means fresh, not unripe or a green-skinned variety — ordinary fresh ginger from the produce aisle. Two ounces is a piece about the size of a thumb and a half; weigh it rather than trusting a cup measure, since chopped ginger packs very unevenly.
- Very hard pearsThe recipe depends on it. Seckel, Kieffer or any underripe firm pear holds its shape through a long boil; a ripe Bartlett collapses into sauce. Peel and core before chopping, and weigh after trimming if you want the sugar ratio to hold.
- The lemons"Three lemons chopped fine" most likely means the whole fruit, peel and all; the bitterness and the pectin in peel and pith would be part of the point. Pick out every seed, and slice the peel thin, since it softens more slowly than the pears.
- Sugar ratioFour pounds of sugar to four pounds of fruit is about 9 cups to 12 cups chopped pear. It is a preserving quantity, not a sweetness preference, and cutting it will give you a loose, perishable syrup.
- Pan and stirringUse a wide, heavy non-reactive pot with plenty of headroom. As the syrup thickens it catches easily, so stir up from the bottom more often in the last twenty minutes.
- Yield and keepingRoughly ten to twelve half-pint jars. The book gives no processing instructions, which was usual for preserve receipts of this period; refrigerate what you open and follow a current tested water-bath canning process, with its own times, if you intend to store jars on a shelf.
Ginger pears turn up again and again in late nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, and the reason is likely agricultural rather than culinary: the hard, gritty, blight-resistant Kieffer pear was planted widely across the Northeast in that period, and it was nearly inedible raw. Long cooking in heavy syrup with lemon and ginger was the standard way to make such fruit worth harvesting. The pairing of pear with ginger is much older than the Kieffer raditional in English and Continental cookery. Note too the phrase "green ginger," which distinguished the fresh rhizome from dried and ground ginger, and naming it that way told the cook not to substitute.