Home › The Pear › Pear Marmalade
Pear Marmalade
To each pound of rather juicy pears, peeled and cored, allow one and a half pounds of sugar with the grated rind and juice of a lemon or orange, or one-third part of some tart berry-marmalade or fruit-juice. Cook down as for other marmalades, skimming and stirring often.
A ratio recipe rather than a fixed one: weigh the fruit after peeling and coring and scale from there. The whole thing hinges on acid, because pears have almost none of their own.
- The acid is not optionalPears are low in both acid and pectin, which is why the recipe insists on lemon or orange, or a third part of tart berry marmalade or juice. Leave it out and you get sweet pear sludge that never sets and keeps poorly.
- Weigh after peeling"To each pound of rather juicy pears, peeled and cored" means prepared weight. Roughly 1 1/4 lb of whole pears will give about 1 lb prepared, so buy around a quarter more than the prepared weight you want.
- The sugar ratio1 1/2 lb sugar to 1 lb fruit is heavier than most modern preserves, which run closer to equal weights or less. It is a keeping ratio, and it will taste distinctly sweet; cutting it will shorten the shelf life and lengthen the cooking.
- "Cook down as for other marmalades"Uncovered, over medium heat, at a lazy boil until thick. Expect 45 minutes to over an hour depending on how juicy the pears are and how wide the pan is. A wide pan is faster and less likely to scorch.
- Knowing when it is doneA common period test was a spoonful cooled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. If you prefer a thermometer, 220F/104C at sea level is the standard set point for a full-sugar preserve.
- Stirring and scorchingThe instruction to stir often is the important one late in the cooking. Pear purée is dense and will catch on the bottom, and scorched sugar taints the whole batch.
- Choosing pears"Rather juicy" means ripe but not collapsing. Bartlett-type pears break down into a smooth marmalade; a firmer pear such as Bosc holds its shape more and gives a chunkier result.
- Storage, which the original omitsThe recipe stops at the pan. For shelf storage, use a current tested procedure for a boiling-water canner; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldThe original gives none; expect several half-pint jars from a batch of this size, depending on how far you cook it down.
"Marmalade" comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff paste of quince (marmelo), and only narrowed to citrus in English usage over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in a book like this one it still carries its older, wider sense of any fruit boiled down with sugar to a thick spreadable mass. Pears sit awkwardly in that tradition, being sweet, mild and short on the acid and pectin that make a preserve set, and this recipe addresses the problem as many did, by borrowing acid from citrus or from a sharper fruit such as currant, cranberry or quince. It is perhaps no accident that so many entries in books of this kind are given as ratios rather than fixed quantities: you weighed whatever the tree gave you and worked from there.