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Pear Chips
Eight pounds of sliced pears (the harder the pears the better), seven pounds of sugar, six lemons (all of juice and part of rind and pulp cut into thin pieces), one-fourth of a pound of green ginger. Put sugar in kettle with one and one-half pints of water; let it boil, and skim; add ginger, lemon and pears, and boil until thickthree hours, if necessary.
— Mrs. Celia S. Chadwick
A straightforward boiled preserve: hard pears cut in thin slices and cooked in sugar syrup with lemon and ginger until the syrup sets. The two things to get right are the ripeness of the fruit and knowing when to stop boiling.
- Hard pears, and mean itThe parenthesis is the whole method. Underripe or windfall pears hold their shape as slices through three hours of boiling; a ripe Bartlett collapses into sauce. Slice thin and evenly, roughly 1/8 inch, so the pieces candy rather than soften.
- Green gingerThis is fresh ginger root, not the ground spice and not crystallised ginger. Four ounces is a large hand of it. Peel and slice into thin coins or matchsticks so it perfumes the syrup and can be eaten alongside the fruit.
- The lemonsSix lemons gives all the juice plus "part" of the rind and pulp, an amount left to the cook. Two or three lemons' worth of rind, sliced paper-thin with the white pith trimmed away, is enough; more turns the preserve bitter.
- Quantities and vesselEight pounds of pears is about 16 to 20 medium fruit, and seven pounds of sugar is roughly 16 cups. One and one-half pints is 3 cups of water. You need a preserving pan of at least 12 quarts; the mixture foams up hard in the first half hour.
- SkimmingThe scum that rises when the syrup first boils is impurities from the sugar. Lift it off before the fruit goes in, or it clouds the finished jars.
- "Boil until thick"Three hours is an upper limit for a batch this size, not a target; the recipe says three hours "if necessary." Test instead: the syrup is done at about 220F, or when a spoonful cooled on a cold plate wrinkles and does not run. Stir often near the end, as this much sugar scorches quickly.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 8 to 10 pints. The sugar concentration is high enough to preserve the fruit, but the recipe says nothing about sealing; follow current guidance for jars and a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate what you will eat within a few weeks.
- ServingPear chips are a sweet condiment rather than a jam, suited to cold meats and cheese, or to a plain pudding or cake.
"Chips" in nineteenth-century American preserving means fruit cut in thin slices and cooked in heavy syrup until translucent and chewy, closer to candied fruit than to jam; watermelon-rind chips appear the same way in books of the period. The lemons and the fresh ginger are the telling detail: both had to be bought in rather than grown at home, which suggests a household with reliable store shipments. Community cookbooks of this kind were often compiled from contributors' handwritten receipts, which is why the instructions assume you already know what "thick" looks like and how much rind is "part" of a lemon.