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Pear Preserves
Pare, cut in halves, core and weigh (if hard, boil in water until tender, and use the water for the syrup), allow three-quarters pound sugar for each pound fruit, boil a few moments, skim, and cool ; when luke-warm add pears, and boil gently until syrup has penetrated them and they look clear; some of the pieces will cook before the rest, and must be removed; when done, take out, boil down syrup a little and pour over them a few cloves stuck here and there in the pears add a pleasant flavor. Put in small jars with glass or tin tops, and seal with putty.-Miss Florence Williams.
A straightforward open-kettle preserve of the kind every Southern household put up in late summer, but the sealing method belongs entirely to the nineteenth century and is the reason this one should be read rather than followed.
- Sealing with puttyThe jars here are filled hot and closed with a glass or tin lid bedded in putty, with no processing in a boiling-water bath at all. That seal is neither sterile nor reliably airtight, and the preserve inside was never held at a temperature that would destroy what survives in the headspace. Any pear preserve made now should follow a current tested recipe with a measured processing time.
- Pears are not a high-acid fruitPears sit close to the borderline of the acid range, and unlike most jam recipes this one adds no lemon juice or vinegar. Sugar alone at three-quarters of a pound per pound of fruit is a preservative, not a sterilant, and it does not compensate for the missing acid or the missing heat process.
- Weighing the fruitThe instruction to pare, core and weigh is the whole structure of the recipe: sugar is calculated from prepared fruit weight, not whole fruit. Three-quarters pound sugar per pound of pears is about 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar per pound.
- Cooking water as syrupBoiling hard pears tender first and reusing that water for the syrup is sound practice, and still standard in modern preserving. It carries pear flavour and a little pectin that would otherwise be poured down the drain.
- "Lukewarm" before the fruit goes inCooling the skimmed syrup before adding the pears is deliberate. Fruit dropped into boiling syrup shrivels and toughens on the outside before the sugar can move inward; a cooler syrup lets it penetrate evenly, which is what produces the clear, translucent pieces the recipe describes as done.
- Removing pieces as they clearUneven ripeness means uneven cooking, and the direction to lift out finished pieces is the mark of a cook who had actually done this. Left in, they collapse into shreds while the harder halves are still opaque.
- The clovesA few whole cloves pressed into the fruit rather than dropped loose into the syrup, as this recipe directs. Cloves are assertive, and the recipe asks only for 'a few... stuck here and there.'
The Dixie Cook Book came out of the same compiling enterprise as the Buckeye books of the 1870s and 80s, reworked for a Southern readership, and its preserve chapter reflects a region with more fruit than it could eat fresh and no refrigeration to speak of. Much of the pear grown in the South ran to firm, gritty cooking types rather than the buttery dessert varieties, which may be why the recipe opens with the parenthetical instruction to boil them tender first. Such pears held their shape well in syrup, and a jar of clear, clove-scented pear halves was a familiar pantry item. The attribution to Miss Florence Williams reflects the book's practice of printing signed contributions from named women.