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Preserved Pears
Pears for preserving should be firm and rather sour; if they are small they should be preserved whole; if medium-sized, cut them in halves; if large, in quarters. Peel them with a silver knife, dropping each pear in a basin of cold water as soon as peeled to keep the color nice. When the pears are all peeled and, if necessary, cut, weigh them, allowing an equal weight of sugar; put the fruit in a saucepan on the stove with enough cold water to cover it completely and let it boil gently until soft enough to yield slightly to gentle pressure with the fingers. While the pears are boiling put the sugar in a preserving-pan; to each pound of sugar add two breakfast cupfuls of cold water, and to every five or six pounds of the juice the thinly-pared rind of two lemons and two ounces of green ginger root scraped and scalded; boil the syrup, taking off the scum as it rises. When the fruit is tender put it in the preserving-pan with the syrup and boil till the pears look clear, then remove from the fire and let the preserve cool in the syrup and then put in jars, fastening so as to be air-tight.
The syrup-making here is sound old confectionery practice, but the filling and sealing method is the part that has been overtaken entirely, and it is the reason this cannot be followed as printed.
- The preserve is jarred coldOscar has you cool the fruit in the syrup and only then fill and seal. Cold filling into unsterilised jars, with no heat processing afterwards, gives mould and yeast every opportunity in the headspace and no step that destroys them. Current practice fills hot and processes the sealed jars.
- "Fastening so as to be air-tight" is not a methodIn the 1890s that could mean a screw-top or wire-bail jar with a rubber ring, or a cover sealed with melted paraffin. Without heat processing none of these gives a verified vacuum seal, and paraffin sealing has since been abandoned because it shrinks and cracks, letting spoilage grow beneath the wax.
- Pears sit at the wrong end of the acid scalePears sit near the borderline of the acid scale -- they generally fall below pH 4.6, the line for boiling-water processing, but some fruit runs close to it. The lemon rind here contributes aroma, not measured acid, and no juice or added acid appears anywhere in the recipe.
- No processing time, no jar sizeThe instructions give no jar size, no headspace, no boiling-water-bath time. Those three figures are what make a modern preserve reliable, and none of them can be reconstructed from the text. Use a current tested recipe for pear preserves instead.
- Archaic measures, for reading rather than makingA "breakfast cupful" of this period is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, and it is genuinely imprecise. "Green ginger root" is simply fresh ginger, not preserved or crystallised; two ounces is a fair-sized piece of root.
- Why the silver knifeCarbon-steel blades of the period reacted with fruit acids and left grey-black streaks on cut surfaces. Silver was inert enough to avoid it. Stainless steel does the same job now, and the cold-water bath still prevents browning.
- Firm and sour is deliberateUnder-ripe, acidic pears hold their shape through the two separate boils. Dessert-ripe fruit collapses into shreds long before the pears "look clear."
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, and long sections of the volume read like a housekeeper's manual rather than a hotel kitchen's. Weighing fruit and matching it with an equal weight of sugar was a standard preserving ratio of the era, sugar being the preservative and the boiling merely a means of getting it into the flesh; the technique long predates any understanding of the microbes involved. The instruction to peel with silver rather than steel is a small fossil of pre-stainless cookery, and it turns up in household books on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.