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Ginger Pears
5 pounds hard pears
⅓ cup preserved ginger
3 cups water
3 lemons, juice and grated rind
5 pounds sugar
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 open-kettle preserve from the era before water-bath processing was standard. The proportions are sound; only the sealing method needs updating.
- Sealing"Pour into clean, hot jars and seal" is open-kettle canning, which relied on the hot syrup to sterilise the jar and pull a vacuum. Current practice for a high-sugar, high-acid fruit preserve is to fill sterilised jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude. Without processing, treat the jars as refrigerator preserves and use them within a month.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars; crystallised ginger is the nearest substitute, drained and blotted before chopping. Not fresh root. A third of a cup is somewhere around 2 to 3 oz; fresh ginger is sharper and would need cutting back substantially.
- Hard pearsBosc, Seckel or genuinely underripe Bartletts. A ripe, soft pear collapses into sauce during the long simmer with sugar. Firmness matters more than variety.
- SugarFive pounds to five pounds of fruit is a 1:1 ratio by weight, standard for period preserves and necessary here for keeping quality and set. Reducing it gives a loose, quick-spoiling syrup.
- Two-stage cookingThe pears are softened in plain water first, then the sugar goes in. This order is deliberate: sugar added early firms the fruit and makes it much harder to soften afterwards.
- Judging thicknessNo time is given for the final simmer. Expect 45 minutes to well over an hour. The syrup is ready when it sheets from a spoon, or reads about 220F; the pear slices will look translucent and amber.
- LemonThree lemons supply both acid for set and keeping, and rind for aroma. Zest before juicing, and take only the yellow layer.
- YieldSomething in the region of six to eight pint jars, depending on how far the syrup is reduced.
Ginger pears belong to the American preserving tradition of sweet-sharp fruit put up in late summer and eaten through the winter alongside cold meat and at tea. Hard cooking pears were a natural candidate because they keep their shape under long simmering and carry other flavours well. Preserved stem ginger imported from China, sold in stoneware jars, was available in American groceries by the turn of the century and turns up repeatedly in recipes of this kind. The instruction to "seal" with no further processing reflects common practice of the day, before home canning guidance settled on the boiling water bath as the minimum.