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Pear Pickles
Prepare syrup as for peaches, pare and cut fruit in halves, or quarters if very large, and if small leave whole, put syrup in porcelain kettle, and when it boils put in fruit, cook until a silver fork will easily pierce them; skim out fruit first and place in jar, and last pour over syrup boiling hot; spice like peach pickles, draining them each day, boiling and skimming the syrup, and pouring it boiling hot over the fruit until fully done. By cooking pears so much longer at first they do not need to be boiled so frequently, but they must be watched carefully until finished, and if perfectly done, will keep two or more years. Apple pickles may be made in the same way, taking care to select such as will not lose shape in boiling. .
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle of the kind that filled Southern pantry shelves before anyone measured acidity or processing time. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the preserving method is not usable, and the points below explain why.
- Why this fails as writtenThere is no vinegar quantity anywhere in the instruction, and none in the syrup it refers back to that can be verified on this page. With neither a known acid level nor any measured processing time, the keeping quality of the pack cannot be judged. A current tested recipe for pickled pears should be used instead.
- Open-kettle sealingPouring boiling syrup over fruit in a jar does not produce a reliable vacuum seal, and the practice was abandoned in home-canning guidance decades ago. Nothing in the method sterilises the headspace or the lid.
- The daily drainingThe fruit sits in an unsealed jar between drainings while the syrup is repeatedly poured off, boiled and returned. Each cycle exposes warm, sugary fruit to fresh surface contamination.
- "Will keep two or more years"The absence of visible spoilage in a sweet fruit pack is not by itself evidence that the jar is sound.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamelled cast-iron or lined pan. The point was to keep vinegar off bare iron or copper, which discolours fruit and picks up metallic flavour. Stainless steel serves the same purpose now.
- "Spice like peach pickles"The spicing is not given here at all; it points back to the book's peach pickle recipe, which is where the whole spices and their quantities would be found. The recipe is written to be read alongside its neighbours rather than on its own.
- The silver fork testA test of texture, not doneness in any food-safety sense: the fork should slide in without the half collapsing. Silver was probably specified because, unlike iron or steel, it would not discolour the fruit.
- The pears themselvesThis suits hard cooking pears that hold their shape through long boiling rather than soft ripe dessert fruit, which is also why the note about apples specifies varieties "that will not lose shape in boiling."
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compilations built out of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, re-edited in the 1880s with Southern contributors and Southern produce, and its pickle chapters are long because sweet pickling was one of the few ways to keep a heavy fruit crop through winter. Sweet pickles — fruit cooked in vinegar, sugar and whole spice — sit between the preserve and the condiment, and were eaten with roast and cured meats rather than as dessert. The technique of drawing off the syrup for several successive days, boiling it down and returning it hot, was standard in nineteenth-century preserving manuals: each pass concentrated the sugar a little further while the fruit gradually took it up, which was thought to keep the halves firm instead of shrivelling them in one heavy syrup. The recipe's confidence that a well-made jar would last "two or more years" reflects a household economy in which the pantry, not the calendar, decided when something was finished.