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Pears Preserved with Ginger or Lemon
Peel and quarter pears, weigh and allow a quarter pound of green ginger (scraped) to each pound of fruit. Have a syrup prepared as for preserves and in this lay the pears and ginger, proceeding as with the preserves. Lemon peel may be used instead of ginger.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the book's basic preserve method: fruit laid in hot syrup, cooked until clear, then sealed. Two things need filling in — what the syrup is, and how much ginger a quarter pound per pound of fruit actually turns out to be.
- Green ginger"Green ginger" here means fresh ginger root, not unripe or pickled ginger. Scraping refers to taking off the thin skin with the back of a knife.
- The ginger proportionA quarter pound of fresh ginger to every pound of pears is fiercely hot by modern taste. Modern versions of this preserve generally use far less, on the order of 1-2 oz per pound of fruit, sliced thin so it can be eaten or lifted out.
- The syrupPreserve syrups of this kind commonly run to about equal weights of sugar and fruit, dissolved in enough water to cover; roughly 1 lb sugar and 1 cup water per pound of prepared fruit is a workable starting point. A lighter syrup will give a softer, less candied result.
- Choose firm pearsBosc, Seckel or slightly underripe Bartlett hold their shape. Fully ripe pears collapse into sauce in the syrup, which is the usual way this recipe fails.
- Cooking to "clear"Preserves of this kind are done when the fruit turns translucent and the syrup has thickened; expect something in the region of half an hour to an hour at a bare simmer. Hard boiling toughens pear flesh and it does not soften again.
- Lemon peel versionUse pared zest only, no white pith. A squeeze of juice added at the end sharpens either version.
- SealingThe book takes canning knowledge for granted and gives no processing time. Pears are acid enough for a boiling-water bath; follow a current tested schedule for pear preserves rather than the old practice of sealing hot jars and trusting the sugar.
- YieldTwo pounds of pears fills roughly three to four half-pint jars.
Gingered pears are often said to be a long-standing item in American and English preserving, and they exist for a practical reason: pears are bland, low in acid and low in pectin, so a plain pear preserve tastes of little and sets poorly. Ginger and lemon peel both supply the sharpness the fruit lacks. The phrase "green ginger" for the fresh root is older than the recipe and was standard grocers' language when dried and ground ginger was the more common form on a household shelf. Books like this one typically ran a single master syrup method and then listed variations against it \— one reason the instructions here are so telegraphic. A heavy crop ripening all at once, with pears famously going from hard to mealy in a matter of days, gave a household reason to know a preserve recipe by heart.