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Pear Jelly
Select ripe juicy pears and cut them into quarters. Put them in a preserving-pan with one pint of water for every four pounds of pears, place them over a slow fire, and boil till reduced to a pulp. Put the pears into a jelly-bag, which should be hung over a basin, and let them drain for twelve or fourteen hours. At the end of that time squeeze the bag to obtain any juice that may not have run through into the basin, measure the juice, and put it into the preserving-pan with four ounces of loaf-sugar for every breakfast cupful of it. Flavor with a small quantity of lemon-juice, and boil it over a brisk fire stirring continually until reduced to a jelly. Turn the jelly into small jars, leave it until cold, then put a brandied paper on the top of each and cover with parchment, tieing it down securely. Keep the jars in a dry store cupboard for use.
A plain English fruit jelly of the sort Oscar's book carries dozens of, written for cooks who judged setting by eye. Two things need translating: the sugar ratio, and the fact that pears are among the poorest setting fruits in the kitchen.
- The hinge: pears barely set on their ownPears are low in both pectin and acid; the recipe's lemon juice, given there only as flavouring, also helps the set. Use fruit on the underripe side rather than the "ripe juicy" ones specified, leave the cores and skins in during the first boil, and be more generous with the lemon than the "small quantity" called for — a couple of tablespoons per cup of juice is not too much. With little added acid the mixture may well reduce to a syrup rather than a jelly.
- "A breakfast cupful"An informal Victorian measure, usually taken as 8 to 10 fl oz. Treat it as 1 cup (8 oz) and the ratio becomes 4 oz sugar — about 1/2 cup plus a spoonful — per cup of juice. That is lean by modern standards; most current jelly recipes use closer to equal volumes of sugar and juice, which sets faster and more reliably.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone to be nipped off with sugar shears. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- Fire temperatures"A slow fire" for the first cooking means the lowest heat that keeps a bare simmer; the quartered pears want 40 minutes to an hour to collapse. "A brisk fire" for the second boil means a full rolling boil. Setting point is 220F on a candy thermometer, or when a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled plate.
- The jelly bag, and whether to squeeze itTwelve to fourteen hours of unassisted dripping gives a clear jelly; squeezing the bag at the end, as instructed, pushes pulp through and clouds it. Squeeze if you want the yield, leave it alone if you want the look. A double layer of dampened muslin in a colander does the same job.
- Brandied paper and parchmentA disc of paper dipped in brandy laid on the surface of the jelly (here after it has cooled, as the recipe directs), then a parchment cover tied with string — the standard Victorian mold-proofing. It is not a seal. Modern practice is either to refrigerate the filled jars and use the jelly within a few weeks, or to fill sterilised canning jars and process them by current water-bath directions, since some pears sit near the borderline of the safe acidity range for unprocessed storage.
- YieldNot stated. Four pounds of pears plus the pint of water will give a few cups of strained juice, and at this sugar ratio perhaps two half-pint jars, though the figure depends on the fruit and on how far the jelly is boiled down.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the 1896 Cook Book that carries his name is less a record of hotel cookery than a vast compilation of the standard European and American domestic repertoire — some 900 pages of it, jellies and preserves included. This entry reads like the English housekeeping manuals it was drawn from: the jelly-bag hung overnight, sugar reckoned by the breakfast cup, the brandy-dipped paper disc that generations of cooks used to keep mold off a preserve before sealed jars were common. Pear jelly itself was a way of using up a glut of a fruit that does not keep, and its reputation for being difficult is earned — pears are low in the pectin and acid that a jelly needs, and other fruits were often said to be added to make up the difference. That the recipe leans on lemon juice "for flavor" suggests its author knew the practical reason without naming the chemistry, whose systematic application to jelly-making came only later.