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Chipped Pears
2 pounds sugar 4 lemons Pare, core, and chip pears; wash lemons, remove seeds, and chop; add chopped ginger and sugar; cook very slowly four hours. Pour into glasses and cover.
The ingredient list has clearly lost a line in setting: no quantity of pears or ginger is given, though both appear in the method. Work from the sugar, which is the fixed point.
- The missing quantitiesTwo pounds of sugar to four lemons would suit roughly 4 lb of prepared pears, a ratio found in other chipped-pear recipes of the period, but the book does not say so and the amount is genuinely ambiguous. Ginger is unmeasured as well; 2 to 3 oz fresh, or about 1/4 lb of preserved ginger, is in keeping with similar recipes.
- "Chip" means sliceChipped fruit is cut in thin flat slices, not diced. Thin slices go translucent in the syrup, which is the whole point of the finished preserve; chunks stay opaque and stubborn.
- Use firm pearsBosc or Seckel, or any hard pear slightly underripe. A ripe Bartlett collapses into sauce well before the four hours are up.
- The whole lemon goes inWashing rather than peeling is deliberate — rind, pith and flesh are all chopped and cooked, supplying the pectin and acid that set the syrup. Remove seeds only.
- Very slowly means very slowlyFour hours at a bare simmer, uncovered, over the lowest heat that keeps bubbles moving. Anything brisker scorches the sugar against the pan before the pears clarify. A heavy-bottomed pot matters more than the timing.
- Judging the endIgnore the clock if the syrup is ready earlier: the slices should be amber and translucent and the syrup should sheet thickly off a spoon, around 220F. Overcooked, it turns to hard candy on cooling.
- "Glasses" and coveringThese are jelly glasses, commonly about half a pint, and "cover" at this date usually meant a disc of paraffin poured over the hot surface, though paper or tin covers were also used and the book does not specify. Current practice is to fill sterilised half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the top and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes; the sugar concentration is high, but the paraffin seal is no longer considered reliable.
- YieldPerhaps four to five half-pint jars if you work from 4 lb of pears, though with the fruit quantity missing this is only an estimate. It is a spoon preserve for toast, cold ham or a cheese board rather than a soft spreading jam.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, which explains the book's heavy chocolate and cocoa chapters — but it also carries a full general household repertoire, preserving included. Chipped preserves belong to that late-nineteenth-century American habit of stretching a hard, unglamorous fruit into something keepable: pears, quinces and watermelon rind were all sliced thin and held in heavy sugar syrup for hours until they went clear. Ginger and lemon were the standard flavourings for pear, which on its own is mild to the point of blankness. The four-hour cooking is not fussiness; before commercial pectin was widely sold to home cooks, long evaporation and whole citrus were how a preserve was brought to a set.