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Pear Preserves
Scald the fruit, but do not let it remain till it comes to pieces. Boil till clear, in a syrup made of as many pounds of sugar as you have of fruit.--Mrs.
Two sentences that assume you already know how preserving works. The proportions are the whole recipe: equal weights of sugar and prepared fruit, and fruit that holds its shape.
- The hinge: scald, don't cookThe scald appears to be there to soften the flesh just enough that syrup can penetrate, not to cook the pears. A few minutes in simmering water, until a skewer meets slight resistance, then lift them out before the edges start to fray.
- "Pound for pound"Weigh the peeled, cored fruit and match it with the same weight of granulated sugar. For a manageable batch, 3 lb prepared pears to 3 lb sugar with about 1 cup water to start the syrup dissolving.
- Which pearsThe recipe names no variety. Hard cooking pears, including the sand pear types grown in the region, stay firm through long boiling. Bartletts or Comice will collapse; choose slightly underripe Bosc or Kieffer.
- "Boil till clear"This is the doneness test and it is a real one. The fruit turns from opaque white to translucent amber as syrup replaces the water in the flesh, which takes a long slow simmer rather than minutes. Rushing it at a hard boil breaks the pears before they clarify.
- Syrup consistencyThe syrup should sheet from a spoon and read about 220F on a thermometer. Below that the preserves stay loose; much above it they candy and go grainy on standing.
- AcidPears are low in acid and the original calls for none. The juice of one lemon per 3 lb of fruit, added near the end, sharpens the flavour and helps keep the sugar from crystallising.
- SealingPeriod practice was often to pour preserves into crocks or jars and top them with paraffin or brandy-soaked paper, though this recipe says nothing about it. Both methods are obsolete; fill hot sterilised jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath according to current guidance, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- Yield3 lb of pears with 3 lb of sugar gives several half-pint jars.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the recipe is written as a reminder rather than an instruction: the contributor assumed her reader had put up fruit every August of her life. Pound-for-pound preserving is often said to have been a common Southern method before reliable canning, since sugar at that concentration does the preserving work on its own, and hard-fleshed pears such as the Kieffer, widely planted in the region later in the century, were valued precisely because they were too gritty to eat raw but held their shape beautifully in syrup. The instruction to scald and then boil till clear is the whole craft compressed into a line, and it is a good example of how these community cookbooks worked: proportions and a doneness cue, with the judgement left to the cook.