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Chipped Gingered Pear
8 pounds of seckel or other nice pears, 8 pounds of granulated sugar, 1/2 pound candied ginger root, 4 lemons. Chip or slice the pears very fine, slice the ginger root, and let these boil together with the sugar for one hour, slowly. Boil the lemons whole in clear water until tender; then cut up in small bits, removing the seeds. Add to the pear and boil one hour longer, and pour that into tumblers or large-top cans. Delicious to eat with cake for luncheon. Use candied ginger root in preference to the green root. Jam Take whatever fruit to be made into jam; pick, wash. If large fruit is used, peel, core, or pit, as the case may be, and dice. To each pound of fruit allow a pound of sugar. Put the sugar into a copper or preserving kettle; add enough water to dissolve it. Cook until a boiling, thick syrup is produced, then add the fruit. Draw to one side and keep the syrup just below the boiling-point until the fruit becomes transparent; then pour into glasses or jars, cover with paraffin paper, and tie down.
A two-hour, equal-weight sugar preserve of the old school: essentially a ginger-pear conserve rather than a jam, thick enough to slice-spoon onto cake. The proportions are sound, but the vessels and the sealing method belong to 1900.
- Scale it down firstEight pounds of pears with eight pounds of sugar makes a very large quantity of preserve, well over a dozen half-pint jars. A quarter batch (2 lb pears, 2 lb sugar, 2 oz candied ginger, 1 lemon) behaves the same way and is far easier to manage in a domestic pan.
- Seckel pearsSeckels are the tiny russeted dessert pears that come to market in early autumn; they are firm and very sweet, which is why they hold their shape through two hours of cooking. Bosc is the best common substitute. Bartlett will collapse into a puree, which is not what this recipe wants.
- "Chip" means shredChipping is slicing very thin and short, closer to a coarse shred than a dice. The fineness matters here: it is what lets the pear go translucent and suspend in the syrup rather than sitting in lumps.
- Candied ginger, not stem ginger in syrupThe recipe's preference for candied root over "green" (fresh) root is probably about texture as much as heat. Use dry crystallised ginger, sliced thin; ginger preserved in syrup will add unmeasured liquid, and fresh ginger gives a sharper, less rounded flavour.
- The lemons are cooked twice on purposeBoiling them whole in plain water until a skewer goes through easily (the recipe says only "until tender"; expect half an hour or more) draws out much of the bitterness from the peel so the whole fruit can be used. Skip that step and the pith will make the finished preserve harsh. Discard that water and the seeds.
- Heat and stirringTwo hours of sugar at 1:1 will scorch in a thin pan. Use the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have, keep it at a lazy simmer rather than a rolling boil, and stir down to the bottom often in the second hour as it thickens and darkens.
- Copper and preserving kettlesThe copper pan called for in the period was prized for even heat. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the same job; avoid bare aluminium with this much lemon.
- Tumblers and paraffin are obsolete"Tumblers or large-top cans" sealed with waxed paper allowed surface mould, which is why the method has been abandoned. Fill sterilised canning jars, leave a quarter-inch of headspace, and either process in a boiling-water bath according to current guidance for your jar size and altitude, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
Ginger and pear is a recurring pairing in nineteenth-century American preserving, appearing under names like ginger pear, pear chips and pear honey; the fruit is bland and abundant in autumn, and the ginger and lemon do the work of making it interesting. The Seckel named here is an American pear, generally traced to a farm near Philadelphia in the early 1800s and named for the man who owned the land; it was popular in the East for its small, sugary fruit. Dried and sugared ginger was a staple grocery import, which may be why the recipe prefers it to the fresh root. Serving it "with cake for luncheon" places it among the sweet preserves offered at the midday table.