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Pear Chips
8 lbs. pears. 4 lbs. sugar. ¼ lb. Canton ginger 4 lemons Wipe pears, remove stems, quarter, and core; then cut in small pieces. Add sugar and ginger, and let stand over night. In the morning add lemons cut in small pieces, rejecting seeds, and cook slowly three hours. Put into a stone jar.
The text as printed here is incomplete: the pears and the sugar, which are the whole substance of the preserve, have dropped out of the ingredient list, and "14 lb. Canton ginger" is a corruption of what was almost certainly a fraction of a pound. What survives explains the method but cannot be followed as a formula, and the storage instruction belongs to an era before sealed processing.
- The missing quantitiesComparable versions of pear chips in books of this period run to several pounds of pears, with sugar somewhere between half the weight of the fruit and an equal weight of it. Because the printed page gives neither figure, the sugar-to-fruit ratio — the thing that actually preserves the finished conserve — is unknown, and guessing at it is guessing at whether the jar keeps.
- "14 lb. Canton ginger"Canton ginger is young ginger preserved in heavy syrup, sold in stoneware jars and imported through the China trade; the modern equivalent is stem ginger in syrup. Fourteen pounds of it against an unstated quantity of pears is not a plausible instruction, and the original almost certainly read a quarter of a pound.
- The stone jarA stone jar is a glazed earthenware crock, not a canning jar. The recipe ends with no sterilizing, no sealing, and no processing time, which is consistent with preserves kept in a cold pantry and skimmed if mould appeared. Room-temperature storage in an unsealed crock is not a shelf-stable method by current standards.
- Overnight standingThe sugar-and-fruit maceration left out overnight is doing real work — it draws juice from the pears so the syrup forms without added water. In a period kitchen this would likely have been a cool larder; it is not a step to leave in a warm modern room.
- Three hours of cookingThe long slow cooking is what turns the pear pieces translucent and thickens the syrup, so the time is not a mistake. It is also why the fruit must be cut small and evenly, and why a heavy pan matters: at that length, sugar on a thin base scorches.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe for pear or ginger pear preserve, with weighed fruit and sugar and a specified water-bath processing time, and read this page as a record of the method rather than as working instructions.
"Chips" here describes the cut, not a dry snack: the pears are reduced to small pieces that go clear and candied in their own syrup, the same idea behind the citron and watermelon-rind chips that appear in the preserving chapters of nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The flavouring is a clue to date and place — Canton ginger reached New England kitchens in glazed jars by way of the China trade, and preserved ginger appears repeatedly alongside pears in American preserving recipes of the period, supplying the aromatic bite that a ripe pear on its own lacks. Canning and preserving occupied a long chapter in books of this kind because a household with a pear tree faced a glut that arrived all at once and would not keep; sugar, in quantity, was the answer, and preserves like this were stored by the crock rather than the sealed jar.