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Spiced Pears
1/2 ounce whole allspice 1/2 ounce whole cloves 1/2 stick cinnamon Tie the spices in a small cheesecloth bag; boil ten minutes with the vinegar and sugar. Skim, add fruit and cook until tender. Remove the fruit; boil down the sugar and vinegar until syrupy; pour over the fruit in jars and seal.
Peaches, grapes, plums, cantaloup, quinces, watermelon rind and cucumbers may be prepared in the same way.
This is a sweet-pickle formula of the open-kettle era, and it is incomplete in exactly the places that matter for safe canning. The notes below explain what is missing and why it cannot be followed as printed.
- No vinegar quantity is givenThe ingredient list names spices and one pound of sugar, but never states how much vinegar. In a sweet pickle the vinegar-to-fruit ratio is a large part of what keeps the finished pH low, and with that number absent the acidity of the result is unknowable -- a particular concern for the low-acid substitutions the recipe suggests.
- No fruit quantity either"Add fruit" gives no weight or count of pears. Even if the vinegar were specified, the amount of fruit going into the kettle would still be a guess, and fruit dilutes the acid as it releases juice.
- "Seal" means open-kettle sealingIn books of this period, hot food was ladled into jars and the lids closed with no further processing. That method is no longer considered safe for any home-canned product: it relies on the heat of the syrup alone to sterilise the jar and headspace, and it routinely fails to produce a reliable vacuum seal.
- No processing time or temperatureThere is no boiling-water bath, no time, no jar size. Current practice for pickled fruit specifies all three, adjusted for altitude. Nothing here can be substituted in without also fixing the acid ratio, which is why this needs a modern tested recipe rather than a patch.
- Boiling down the syrup separatelyReducing the syrup after the fruit comes out concentrates the sugar, and it alters the strength of the vinegar in the syrup that finally goes into the jar by an amount the original never measured.
- The spice quantities, for referenceHalf an ounce of whole allspice is roughly 2 tablespoons of berries; half an ounce of whole cloves is about the same. Tying them in cheesecloth is sound practice and keeps the syrup clear.
- If you want spiced pearsUse a current tested recipe from a reputable canning authority, which will give you weights of fruit, a stated vinegar strength, and a processing time. Refrigerator pickles kept cold and eaten within a few weeks are the other route.
Spiced fruit in a sweet-sour syrup was a fixture of the American preserving cupboard from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, set out alongside roast pork, ham or cold fowl in the way a chutney or relish is now. Preserving fruit in vinegar and sugar with warm spices descends from medieval and early modern European practice. The long list of substitutions at the end -- peaches, grapes, plums, cantaloup, quinces, watermelon rind, cucumbers -- reflects a common habit of the period's cookbooks, which offered one master method a cook could apply to whatever the season and the orchard produced. Spiced watermelon rind pickle appears in many American books of the era.