Pear Chips
Wipe and stem hard pears. To four pounds allow three pounds of sugar, and an eighth pound scraped green ginger root grated. Slice thin in bits and let stand twelve hours, then cook with juice and rind of two lemons, letting come slowly to a boil and cooking perhaps three hours: till clear and thick.
A long-boiled ginger conserve in the old style, where the sugar does the work: no water is added, and the twelve-hour stand is what draws enough syrup out of the fruit to cook in. Skip that rest and the pan will scorch.
- The hinge: the twelve-hour standLayer the sliced pears with the sugar and ginger, cover, and leave them at room temperature or in the refrigerator overnight. The sugar pulls juice from the fruit and creates the cooking liquid. There is no other liquid in the recipe.
- Quantities in modern termsFour pounds of pears is roughly eight medium fruit. Three pounds of sugar is about 6 3/4 cups. An eighth pound of green ginger root is 2 oz fresh ginger.
- "Green ginger"This means fresh ginger rhizome, not unripe or preserved ginger, and not the dried ground spice. Fresh is what the supermarket sells; peel it before grating.
- "Hard pears"The recipe wants firm, underripe, gritty fruit that holds its shape through hours of boiling. Bosc, Seckel, or the old Kieffer if you can find it. Ripe Bartlett or Comice will collapse into sauce.
- Slice thin in bitsThe "chips" are thin slices, cut small enough to candy through; something around 1/8 inch suits the description. Thicker cuts are slower to turn translucent at the center.
- The three hoursBring it up slowly, uncovered, at a bare simmer, and stir often once the syrup thickens. The recipe's "perhaps three hours" is plausible for this sugar ratio; the fruit is done when the slices turn translucent and the syrup falls from a spoon in a sheet rather than drops. Timing will vary with the width of your pan.
- LemonThe juice and grated rind of two lemons go in at the start of cooking, not at the stand. The acid helps set the syrup and keeps the sugar from crystallizing.
- Yield and keepingThe original gives no yield, and says nothing about sealing. Refrigerate it and use within a month, or follow current water-bath canning guidance for pear preserves if you want it shelf-stable.
- ServingSweet and strongly gingered; it is a condiment more than a jam. Good with sharp cheese, cold ham, or spooned over rice pudding.
Pear chips belong to the era of the Kieffer pear, a hard, coarse-fleshed hybrid planted widely across the American South and Midwest in the late nineteenth century because it resisted fire blight. It was often said to be poor eating raw, so household books filled up with ways to cook it down, and "chips" — thin slices candied in their own syrup until clear — was one of them. The ginger and lemon are doing more than flavoring: pears are low in acid and mild in taste, so preserving books of the period often leaned on citrus and spice to give them backbone. Recipes titled "pear chips," "pear honey," and "ginger pears" appear in American community and commercial cookbooks between roughly 1880 and 1920, with proportions close to these, which suggests a formula passed around rather than invented by any one author.