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Pickled Pears
Seven pounds of fruit; three and one-half pounds of sugar; one pint of vinegar; and a few cloves. First, put a very little water into the kettle, then add fruit, vinegar, and, last, the sugar. Boil all together until fruit is well cooked. If thick syrup is preferred, boil down until the desired consistency is reached.
CHIPPED (or GINGER) PEARS-Cut eight pounds of pears into small cubes. Add six pounds of sugar and the juice and rind of four seeded lemons. Peel the lemons very thin, lengthwise, and cut the rind into thin strips, like straws. Add one fourth of a pound of green ginger. (Boil the ginger previously, until soft, take off skin and cut into bits.) Pour over all one-half pint of water and boil slowly for two hours. Put into a stone jar, or divide into large jelly glasses.
Two preserves in one entry: a straightforward sweet-sour pickled pear, and a chunky ginger-and-lemon conserve. Both rely on hard, underripe pears, which is the single thing most likely to go wrong today.
- Use hard pearsThese recipes assume firm cooking pears — Kieffer, Seckel, Bosc — picked before they soften. A ripe Bartlett will collapse into sauce during the long boil. If the only pears available are ripe, expect a spiced pear butter rather than pickled fruit.
- Seven pounds of fruitThe original does not say whether that is weighed before or after peeling and coring. Weigh whole pears and expect roughly a quarter to be lost as peel, core and stem; the sugar-to-fruit ratio is forgiving either way.
- Vinegar strengthA pint is 2 cups. Use standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar; older household vinegars varied, and anything weaker than 5 percent will not carry the preserve.
- "A few cloves"Whole cloves, not ground. Six to ten for the full batch is plenty, and a tied muslin bag makes them retrievable — cloves left loose keep strengthening in the jar and can dominate within a month.
- Add sugar last, as writtenFruit softens more readily in plain liquid, while sugar added at the start tends to firm the flesh, so the order may well be deliberate. Pears started in heavy syrup can stay firm at the centre through a long boil.
- Green gingerFresh ginger root, not preserved or crystallised ginger. A quarter pound is about 4 oz. Simmer it whole until a knife passes through easily, slip off the skin, then chop — young ginger needs 15 to 20 minutes, older fibrous root longer.
- Lemon rind like strawsPeel with a vegetable peeler so no white pith comes away, then stack the strips and shred lengthwise. Pith is the main source of bitterness in a two-hour boil.
- The two-hour boilSlow means a lazy simmer with frequent stirring toward the end; six pounds of sugar to eight of fruit scorches easily once the syrup thickens. Use a heavy pan and a low flame.
- StorageA stone jar in a cold cellar is not a modern option. Pack boiling hot into sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and use within a few weeks. The two batches differ in size, the ginger pears yielding appreciably more, so fill jars as the preserve comes rather than working to a fixed count.
Pickled pears belong to the long English and American tradition of sweet-sour fruit preserves eaten alongside cold meat — the same family as spiced peaches, pickled crabapples and watermelon rind pickle. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and fashion house that expanded into domestic manuals, and its cookbook reflects a household that still put up fruit in quantity each autumn, when hard varieties like the Kieffer were widely planted in American orchards. The second recipe, "chipped" or "ginger" pears, is essentially a conserve — fruit cut into small cubes and boiled long with lemon and ginger — and versions of it circulated widely in community cookbooks under names like ginger pear marmalade.