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Sweet Pickled Pears
Follow recipe for Sweet Pickled Peaches, using pears in place of peaches.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the peach recipe open in front of you. Pears behave differently enough from peaches that a few adjustments matter.
- What you are actually working fromThe peach recipe this page points to is a standard sweet pickle of roughly 7 lb fruit to sugar, vinegar, whole cloves and stick cinnamon, the fruit cooked in the boiling syrup until tender and the syrup boiled down and poured over. Check the exact proportions on the peach page: this page supplies no quantities of its own, so it is only as good as the recipe it points to.
- Choose hard pearsRipe dessert pears collapse in acid syrup. Use firm, underripe fruit — Bosc, Seckel, or the old canning standby Kieffer, which was valued for holding its shape and is gritty and bland eaten raw. Small pears can go in whole with the stems left on; larger ones halved or quartered.
- Peaches are skinned, pears are paredPeaches slip their skins in boiling water. Pears must be peeled with a knife, and they brown fast — hold them in water with a little lemon juice or vinegar until the syrup is ready.
- Vinegar strength has changedVinegar strength -- household vinegar in the 1890s was not of reliable strength. Modern bottled cider vinegar is usually 5 percent acidity, so do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength in a preserve meant to keep.
- Cook to tender, not softPears take longer than peaches — figure 15 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer depending on size and hardness, testing with a skewer that should meet slight resistance. A hard boil splits them and clouds the syrup.
- ClovesWhole cloves stuck into each piece of fruit, as the period recipes direct, are potent; two or three per pear is plenty.
- SealingOpen-kettle filling and sealing, which is what the original assumes, is no longer considered adequate for shelf storage. Either treat these as a refrigerator pickle and eat them within a few weeks, or follow a current tested process for the boiling-water bath.
- Yield and servingSeven pounds of fruit makes a large batch, enough to fill several jars. These are a condiment, not a dessert — two or three pieces alongside ham, pork, cold roast fowl, or a sharp cheese.
Sweet pickling — fruit cooked in a spiced syrup of vinegar and sugar — was the standard American way of keeping the autumn glut of pears, peaches and crab apples for the winter table, and it filled the pantry shelf between the jellies and the true sour pickles. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats it as routine enough to dispose of pears in a single sentence, which tells you how familiar the technique was in 1896. Pears were especially suited to it because some of the varieties then grown for the household, such as the Kieffer, were gritty and bland fresh but held their shape beautifully in syrup. The finished fruit was served as a relish with salt meat, a role that spiced peaches and pears still occupy on holiday tables.