Home › Canning And Preserving › Canned Pears
Canned Pears
Wipe and pare fruit. Cook whole with stems left on, or remove stems, cut in quarters, and core. Follow Directions for Canning. A small piece of ginger root or a few slicings of lemon rind may be cooked with syrup. Bartlett pears are the best for canning.
This entry is a fragment of a larger canning system, and the part that decides whether the jars are safe — the processing method and time — lives elsewhere in the book, in a form no longer considered adequate. The notes below explain why this cannot be followed today.
- No processing time or temperatureThe instruction is simply "Follow Directions for Canning." Nothing here states how long the filled jars are held at what temperature, and that single number is what separates a shelf-stable jar from a spoiled one. A canning procedure without a measured process time cannot be evaluated, let alone repeated.
- Open-kettle fillingThe canning directions of this period often meant cooking fruit in syrup, then ladling it into hot jars and sealing immediately, with little or no processing of the sealed jar; those directions are not on this page, so the exact method cannot be checked here. Filling of that kind relies on the jar's own heat to sterilise the lid and headspace, which it does not reliably do, and it was abandoned in tested home canning guidance decades ago.
- Pears sit close to the acidity lineBotulinum spores are controlled in canned fruit by acidity, and pears are among the least acidic of the common canning fruits. European varieties such as Bartlett normally test below pH 4.6 and are processed in a boiling-water canner; Asian pears sit close enough to the line that tested recipes add lemon juice. Either way, modern tested pear recipes specify a measured process time, and any added ascorbic acid or lemon juice is chiefly to prevent darkening.
- Whole pears with stemsCanning fruit whole, stem attached, leaves a dense core and a large uncut mass for heat to penetrate. Any process time worked out for halves or quarters does not transfer to whole fruit, and this recipe offers both options with a single undefined process.
- Ginger and lemon rindThese are flavourings only. A few slicings of lemon rind contributes essentially no acid to the syrup.
- If you want to can pearsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you jar size, headspace, and a process time adjusted for your altitude. Bartlett is still the variety usually recommended.
Pears were one of the great problems of the nineteenth-century larder: they ripen off the tree, they ripen all at once, and they turn from stony to mealy in a couple of days. Bartlett — the same variety the English call Williams — was the commercial canning pear of North America by the time this book appeared, grown in quantity in New York, Michigan and later California precisely because it holds its shape and flavour in syrup. Recipes like this one belong to the decades when home canning had moved from a novelty to an expected household skill, supported by the mass-produced glass jar with a screw band and rubber ring. What the entry also shows is how much was taken on trust: Farmer gives the reader a paragraph on flavouring the syrup and choosing the variety, and refers the actual preservation science to a set of general directions a few pages away. Systematic laboratory work on processing times for home canning, and the public-health campaigns that followed outbreaks of botulism, came later, and it is that body of work that makes this recipe unusable rather than merely old-fashioned.