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Preserved Pears
4 pounds sugar 2 cups water Wash, pare, and cut pears in halves. Put in cold water. Make a syrup of sugar and water; cook only enough pears to fill a jar at a time; when tender fill jars with fruit, then with syrup, and seal.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit and syrup are ladled into jars, sealed, and left to cool with no processing afterward. It was standard practice in 1907 and is no longer considered safe, and the recipe omits both the quantity of pears and any heat treatment that could be measured.
- No processing step at allNothing here brings the sealed jar to a controlled temperature for a controlled time. The seal depends on steam trapped as the jar cools, which routinely fails or admits organisms during filling, and current guidance for all fruit is a timed boiling-water bath after the jars are closed.
- Pears sit near the acidity lineRipe pears generally fall around pH 3.5 to 4.6 depending on variety and ripeness, and the riper they are the less acid they hold. They are less reliably acidic than plums or currants, which is why modern tested pear recipes give a measured process time, and why some of them, notably those for Asian pears, specify added acid.
- No weight of fruitThe ingredient list gives only sugar and water. Four pounds of sugar to two cups of water is a very heavy syrup, and without a stated quantity of pears there is no way to judge the sugar-to-fruit ratio the preservation was meant to rely on.
- "Seal" meant something elseIn 1907 this meant a glass lid with a rubber ring and a wire bail, or a zinc cap over a rubber. Those closures are not equivalent to a modern two-piece lid, and antique jars and rings should not be used for food storage.
- Fill one jar at a timeThe instruction to cook only enough pears for a single jar plausibly served to keep the fruit intact, since pear halves collapse if crowded and overcooked. Whatever its purpose, it does nothing about the preservation problem.
- If you want preserved pearsUse a current tested recipe from a reputable source, which will give the fruit weight, the acid addition, the syrup strength and the process time for your jar size and altitude.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it wrapped a full general cookbook around the sponsor's product. That general matter included a preserving section. Pears were a mainstay of it: they ripen late and take a heavy syrup well, holding their shape where softer fruit goes to pulp. The reliance on sugar alone as the preservative, and on trapped steam to hold the seal, reflects the state of domestic practice before the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state extension services began publishing tested processing times for home canners in the following decades.