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Pickled Pears
To each six pounds of pears allow a pint of cider- or winevinegar, three pounds of sugar, and a teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves, and ginger (in thin bags). Let the sugar, vinegar, and spices boil up and place in the resulting syrup the peeled pears, a few at a time. Cook until tender; place pears in a crock; pour over them the vinegar and let stand three days. Pour off the syrup and boil it down, then pour again over the pears (having placed them in jars); remove spice-bag, and seal. If tartness is desired the sugar, part or all, may be omitted.
PEAR SAUCE, PLAIN OR FOR SHORT CAKE Make as for Apple Sauce, flavouring with spice, lemon, or other fruit flavouring, and serving as a side dish or with shortcake (see Strawberry Short Cake). 56
This is a sweet spiced fruit pickle of the kind that filled American cellar shelves before tested canning procedures existed. The proportions and the sealing instructions fall outside what is now considered safe, and the notes below explain where.
- The acid is too dilute to rely onOne US pint of vinegar (2 cups) for six pounds of fruit, thinned further by three pounds of sugar and the pears' own juice, gives no assurance that the finished jar sits below pH 4.6. Pears are a borderline-acid fruit to begin with, and modern pickled-pear formulas generally call for more vinegar relative to fruit for exactly this reason.
- The three-day stand in a crockCooked fruit held in a crock at room temperature for seventy-two hours, with no covering specified, is an invitation to yeast, mould and bacterial growth, and any surface mould raises the pH of the liquid beneath it. The period serves to draw syrup out of the pears, but it does so under no temperature control at all.
- "Seal" is not a processHere sealing means no more than a cap tightened onto hot contents. There is no boiling-water bath, no processing time and no headspace given, so the jars are neither reliably vacuum-sealed nor pasteurised; what survives the filling stays alive in the jar.
- Low acid plus an airtight jarThe combination that matters here is a possibly under-acidified food sealed without heat processing and then stored at room temperature. Should the pack sit above pH 4.6, that is the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate, and the resulting toxin gives no smell, taste or visible sign.
- The sugar note makes it worse, not betterOmitting "part or all" of the sugar is offered as a matter of taste, but it changes the whole character of the preserve: sugar contributes to water activity and to the syrup's ability to reduce and thicken. Adjusting it freely in a recipe with no processing step leaves the keeping quality entirely unpredictable.
- If you want spiced pearsUse a current tested recipe from a national extension service or a modern preserving manual, which will specify the vinegar strength, the jar size and the boiling-water processing time. The whole spices in thin cloth bags, the peeled fruit poached a few at a time, and the reduced syrup are all worth keeping; the storage method is not.
Sweet pickled fruit sat at the centre of the nineteenth-century American table, where a dish of spiced pears, peaches or crab apples was served as a relish beside roast meat rather than as a dessert -- the sharp-sweet counterpoint that a modern cook gets from chutney or cranberry sauce. Hard, gritty cooking pears such as the winter Kieffer were ideally suited to it, since they hold their shape through long poaching and were often too coarse to eat out of hand. This recipe belongs to the first decade of the twentieth century, the period when glass jars with rubber-ring closures had become cheap enough for ordinary households; boiling-water processing was already being recommended in print by then, but open-kettle sealing remained common, and the confident instruction to simply "seal" reflects a widespread belief that boiling syrup and a tight lid were sufficient in themselves. The trick of drawing the fruit for several days and then boiling the syrup down separately is genuinely old craft, used to concentrate the pickle without reducing the pears to mush.