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Ginger Pears
5 pounds hard pears 3 cups water 5 pounds sugar 1/3 cup preserved ginger 3 lemons, juice and grated rind Remove the skin and cores from the pears and cut the fruit in slices lengthwise. Add the water and cook until the pears are tender. Add the sugar, juice and grated rind of the lemons, the ginger cut in small pieces, and simmer the mixture until it is thick. Pour into clean, hot jars and seal.
A straightforward sugar preserve that depends almost entirely on using pears that are still firm enough to hold their shape through a long simmer.
- "Hard pears"This means underripe or naturally firm cooking pears — Kieffer, Seckel, Bosc — not soft Bartletts at eating ripeness. Fully ripe pears collapse into sauce before the syrup thickens.
- Preserved gingerIn 1929 this meant stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in stoneware jars, or crystallized ginger. Either works; a third of a cup is roughly 2 oz. Fresh ginger is not a substitute at this quantity, being far sharper and unsweetened.
- YieldFive pounds of fruit with five pounds of sugar makes a very large quantity of preserve. That is a large batch for one pan — use a wide, heavy 8-quart pot so the syrup can evaporate.
- Judging "thick"The syrup is done when it sheets off a spoon rather than running off in drops, roughly 220F on a candy thermometer. The simmering after the sugar goes in can take a considerable time; keep it uncovered and stir often as it thickens.
- Lemon rindGrate the zest before juicing, and take only the yellow layer. The rind is doing real work here — pears are low in acid, and the lemon supplies both flavor and the acidity a preserve needs.
- ScorchingOnce the mixture is heavy with sugar it catches easily on the bottom of the pan. Lower the heat as it tightens and stir through to the base of the pot.
- Sealing"Pour into clean, hot jars and seal" is open-kettle canning, standard practice at the time and no longer recommended. Current practice is to fill sterilized jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints, adjusting for altitude.
New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's women's magazine. Ginger pears belong to a family of hard-pear preserves that gave a use to the Kieffer, a tough, gritty, blight-resistant pear widely planted across American yards in the late nineteenth century and generally considered poor eating raw. Its firmness is exactly what makes it good in a syrup that cooks for an hour. Ginger and lemon were the standard corrective for the pear's blandness, and preserved ginger in syrup — imported largely from China — was a familiar grocery item in the period, which is why the recipe assumes it rather than fresh root.