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Brandied Pears
To four pounds each of peeled fruit and sugar take a pint of brandy. Cook the sugar with a quart of water, simmering two minutes after coming to a boil. Place fruit in this and let boil five minutes. Remove the pears, placing in heated jars; let syrup boil till it thickens, then add the brandy and remove at once from the fire. Pour syrup over fruit and seal. Drain off any syrup which may ooze from the pears when they are first taken from the fire. If the pears are allowed to lie in brandy over night after being cooked they are more certain to keep well. (See also other brandied fruits.)
This is a sealed-jar preserve with no processing step, no measured acid and no stated headspace, and it cannot be recommended as written. The notes below explain the specific failures and translate the archaic quantities so the text can be read with understanding.
- Why the seal is the problemThe pears are packed hot into heated jars and sealed with nothing but syrup — no boiling-water bath, no processing time, no test of the seal. This is the open-kettle method, abandoned in modern practice because the jar interior is never held at a temperature that reliably destroys spoilage organisms and the closure is never proven airtight.
- Pears sit on the acid borderlinePears sit near the acid borderline -- commonly cited figures for ripe pears run about pH 3.5 to 4.6, close to the 4.6 line below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Tested modern recipes treat pears as an acid fruit and do not require added acid, but they do require a processing step, and an unprocessed sealed jar held at room temperature cannot be relied on whatever the fruit's pH.
- The brandy is not a preservative at this dilutionA pint of spirit distributed through four pounds of fruit, four pounds of sugar and a quart of water plus the syrup it makes gives a finished liquid well under 10 percent alcohol by volume — far below the 18 percent or so at which alcohol reliably inhibits microbial growth. The overnight soak the author recommends does not change the arithmetic.
- Sugar concentration is unmeasured"Let syrup boil till it thickens" gives no density and no refractometer figure, so the finished sugar concentration -- the other thing that might have inhibited spoilage -- is unknown from batch to batch.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe for brandied or spiced pears from a food-safety authority, with a specified acid addition, headspace and boiling-water processing time for your jar size and altitude.
- Reading the measuresAn American pint is 2 cups, a quart 4 cups. Four pounds of peeled pears is roughly ten to twelve medium fruit; four pounds of sugar is about nine cups. The brandy goes in and the pan comes off the fire immediately, so little alcohol is driven off.
- "Remove at once from the fire"This is the one instruction in the original with a sound reason behind it: adding spirit to a boiling syrup boils off the alcohol and the volatile aromatics that are the whole point of the preserve. The principle still holds in any modern version.
Brandied fruit belongs to a long tradition of putting up the surplus of a single tree, and pears -- which ripen all at once and bruise readily -- were a prime candidate. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American household books are full of such recipes, usually clustered by fruit as they are here, with a cross-reference to the other brandied fruits treated the same way. What the recipe reveals about its period is how much was left to the cook's judgement: "boil till it thickens" and "more certain to keep well" are the language of a kitchen without thermometers, refractometers or any bacteriological account of why preserves spoil. Reliable home canning guidance in the United States came only with the spread of extension-service bulletins and tested processing times in the decades that followed, which is why so many pre-1920 preserving recipes read as confidently vague to a modern eye.