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Pear Jam
Peel some ripe pears, cut them into quarters, take out the cores, weigh them, and put them into an earthenware jar, packing them closely; put the jar into a sauce pan of water on the stove, cover the jar with a piece of strong paper tied over, and let the water round the jar boil till the fruit is soft enough to break, then put the same weight of sugar as there is of fruit on the stove with two breakfast cupfuls of water to each pound of sugar, and boil and skim till it is a clear syrup; put the fruit into it and stir till it boils, and boil for twenty minutes, stirring all the time; then let it get a little cool, put it into jars, and when quite cold, cover as for other marmalades.
A two-stage English-style preserve: the pears are first steamed soft in a covered jar set in boiling water, then finished in a separately clarified syrup. The method is slower than a modern one-pot jam but it keeps the fruit pale and the syrup clear.
- The hinge: pears are low in acid and pectinA jam of ripe fruit may stay syrupy rather than setting firmly. The juice of one lemon per pound of fruit sharpens the flat sweetness as well as helping the set.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so call it a generous cup. Two per pound of sugar is a great deal of water by modern standards, and boiling it down to a clear syrup before the fruit goes in is the whole point of that step.
- Twenty minutes is not a setTime is unreliable for jam. Boil until a thermometer reads 220F/105C at sea level, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a plate chilled in the freezer. With this much added water it may take considerably longer than twenty minutes.
- The earthenware jar in the saucepanThis is a steam bath, which cooks the pears gently without direct heat. A heatproof bowl over simmering water, covered with foil rather than tied paper, does the same job.
- SkimmingSkim the syrup as it boils, as directed. The scum is impurities and trapped air, and left in it clouds the finished preserve.
- Choice of pearFirmer varieties such as Bosc or Seckel keep their texture better; a very soft, grainy pear turns to puree under this long cooking. Slightly underripe fruit may give a better set, though the recipe itself calls for ripe pears.
- Covering the jars"Cover as for other marmalades" meant paper or a paraffin seal, which invites surface mould. Fill sterilised jars to a quarter inch of the rim, seal with two-piece lids, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or refrigerate and use within a month.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects a great deal of straightforward household preserving alongside the hotel's restaurant cookery, and this jam follows an older English pattern in which fruit and syrup are cooked separately and combined at the end. Clarifying and skimming the syrup was a habit carried over from a time when sugar was less refined, and it survived in print after the step had ceased to be necessary. Pears were an obvious candidate for the preserving pan in a New York kitchen of the 1890s: the autumn crop came in heavy and bruised easily.