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Pear Marmalade
12 pounds of pears (chopped middling fine) 9 pounds sugar 1 pound raisins 3 oranges (juice and rind) 3 lemons (juice and rind) ½ 1/2 pound shelled walnuts (chopped).
Cook till of right consistency.
A conserve rather than a marmalade in the modern citrus sense: 12 pounds of fruit is a full canning-day batch, and the only instruction on method is "cook till of right consistency." Everything hinges on knowing what that consistency is and on scaling the batch down if you do not have a preserving pan.
- What "right consistency" meansThe setting point for a preserve of this sugar content is 220F/104C at sea level, or the point where a spoonful mounded on a chilled saucer wrinkles when pushed. With pears, which are low in pectin and acid, expect a soft, spoonable conserve rather than a firm jelly set.
- Batch sizeTwelve pounds of pears with nine pounds of sugar makes a very large batch, on the order of a dozen pints depending on how far it is cooked down. Quartering the recipe (3 lb pears, 2¼ lb sugar, 4 oz raisins, and so on) is far more manageable and cooks down in a fraction of the time.
- Pan capacityThe full batch needs a 12-quart or larger heavy preserving kettle. A boiling sugar mixture more than a third of the way up the pan will climb and spit; a wide pan also evaporates faster, which is the whole point.
- Weigh the pears preparedThe recipe's "12 pounds of pears (chopped middling fine)" is ambiguous as to whether the weight is taken before or after preparation; if you weigh as bought, reckon on losing about a quarter of that weight to peel and core. Firm, slightly underripe Bartlett or Bosc hold their shape; dead-ripe fruit collapses to purée.
- The citrus rindUse only the coloured zest, grated or shredded fine, and leave the white pith behind or the finished conserve turns bitter over a long boil. The juice does double duty here, supplying the acid pears lack.
- Add the walnuts lastStir the chopped walnuts in during the final five minutes. Nuts boiled for an hour go soft and can turn the preserve muddy and slightly rancid-tasting in storage.
- StirringOnce the mixture thickens it scorches easily. Stir often from the bottom with a flat-edged wooden spoon, and lower the heat as it approaches the set.
- Keeping itThe recipe says nothing about how to put the conserve up. For anything you intend to store at room temperature, follow a current tested water-bath processing time for fruit conserves; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Pear conserves like this one belong to the end-of-season, use-it-up tradition that fills the preserving chapters of turn-of-the-century North American cookbooks: a household with a bearing pear tree got a glut of fruit within a fortnight, and ripe pears do not wait long. Pears bring sweetness and body but almost no acid or pectin, which is why recipes of this type commonly reach for oranges and lemons — for that as much as flavour, though nobody in 1913 would have phrased it that way. The raisins and walnuts mark it as a *conserve* in the older sense of the word, a jam enriched with dried fruit and nuts and meant for the tea table rather than for breakfast toast. The Five Roses book was published by a flour milling company and distributed to households that bought its flour, so the recipes were gathered from ordinary Canadian cooks — which may go some way to explaining the bare, assume-nothing instruction to cook it till it is right.