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Pear Chips
8 lbs. pears 4 lbs. sugar 1/4 lb. Canton ginger 4 lemons Wipe pears, remove stems, quarter, and core; then cut in small pieces. Add sugar and ginger, and let stand over night. In the morning add lemons cut in small pieces, rejecting seeds, and cook slowly three hours. Put into a stone jar.
A long-cooked pear conserve of the sort that got put up in autumn when hard cooking pears came in by the bushel. Nothing but fruit, sugar, ginger and lemon goes into the pot, so the whole success of it rests on the overnight maceration and on very low heat afterward.
- Let the overnight step do its workNo water is added anywhere in this recipe. The sugar has to draw enough juice out of the pears overnight to give you a syrup to cook in. If your pears are firm and dry, expect to add two or three tablespoons of water at the start of cooking so the bottom does not scorch before the syrup forms.
- Canton gingerPreserved ginger in heavy syrup, shipped from Canton (Guangzhou) and sold in stoneware pots. Stem ginger in syrup, drained and sliced thin, is the closest thing on a modern shelf; crystallized ginger works, but rinse off the sugar coating and count it against the 4 lb of sugar. Fresh ginger is not a substitute here - it is sharper and gives none of the candied texture.
- Whole lemons, peel includedThe lemons go in sliced and chopped, rind and all, with only the seeds discarded. The peel supplies both the bitterness that keeps 4 lb of sugar from cloying and a good deal of the pectin that sets the syrup. Scrub them well, since modern citrus is usually waxed.
- Low heat, and stirThree hours is a long time for a heavy sugar syrup. Keep it at a bare simmer in a wide, heavy pan and stir every ten or fifteen minutes near the end, when the syrup thickens and catches easily. The finished chips should be translucent and amber, the syrup thick enough to sheet off a spoon.
- Why "chips"The name most likely refers to the shape: pears cut small so they candy through rather than staying in soft chunks. The recipe says only to quarter, core and cut the pieces small; cutting them fairly thin helps the texture.
- StorageA glazed stone jar under a paper cover was usual for a sugar preserve of this strength, and a little surface mold was often tolerated rather than treated as spoilage. Use sterilized canning jars instead, and either process them by a current water-bath schedule for pear preserves or simply keep the jars in the refrigerator and use them within a couple of months.
- Yield and servingRoughly five to six pints. Spoon it warm or cold over plain steamed and boiled puddings, cornstarch blancmange, or rice; it also does duty as a preserve with cold meat or on toast.
Pear chips belong to the American preserving repertoire, where they suited the hard, gritty kitchen pear - Kieffer and similar varieties that never ripen to good eating quality but candy well in sugar. The distinguishing ingredient is Canton ginger, root ginger boiled in syrup and exported from southern China in stoneware jars; it was widely stocked in American groceries by the late nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period use it for this kind of fruit conserve.