No. 3665

Canned Pears

Poires en Boites

Select pears that are ripe yet firm (Sickle pears in preference); peel, turning them round, and empty with a vegetable scoop to remove all the pips, blanch and refresh. Drain as soon as they are properly cooled off and range them in tin cans each of a quart capacity; fill the can ninetenths full with a fifteen-degree cold syrup; cover and solder. Range these cans in a large saucepan, immerse them in cold water, place on the fire and boil for ten minutes; remove the cans, tap a small hole in the center to allow the air to escape, solder it up immediately and boil for five minutes longer.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a nineteenth-century commercial canning procedure adapted for a professional kitchen, and it depends on a sealing method that no longer exists in domestic use. The notes below explain the terms and why the process itself is the problem.

Soldered tin cansThe seal here is made with a soldering iron, and the solder of the period was tin-lead. Lead migrates readily into acidic contents such as pears in syrup, and there is no safe amount. Nothing in a modern kitchen substitutes for this step as described.
The process is too shortTen minutes in boiling water, then a vent-and-reseal, then five minutes more, is far shorter than any tested modern schedule for quart jars of pears, which run considerably longer. An under-processed sealed container is not something to guess at. Use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority instead.
Venting a sealed can on the stoveTapping a hole in a hot, pressurised can and soldering it shut while the contents are near boiling is a burn and rupture hazard as well as a contamination one. The step exists because the cans were sealed cold and needed the headspace air driven out; modern two-piece jar lids vent themselves.
"Fifteen-degree cold syrup"Degrees Baume on a saccharometer, not temperature. Fifteen Baume is roughly a light syrup, in the neighbourhood of a cup of sugar to three cups of water, though the exact reading depended on the instrument and the temperature it was taken at.
Sickle pearsSeckel pears, a small, dense, very sweet American variety still grown but rarely stocked. The recipe asks for fruit that is ripe yet firm, which suits them.
Blanch and refreshA brief boil followed by an immediate plunge into cold water. It firms the flesh and drives out air so the fruit does not float or brown.
Vegetable scoopA small round scoop, what would now be called a melon baller or parisienne scoop, used here to core the pear while leaving the shape intact.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its preserving chapter includes instructions for hand-soldered tin canning. Nicolas Appert's heat-and-seal method dates to the first decade of the nineteenth century, and tinplate cans followed shortly after in Britain; by Ranhofer's day a well-staffed kitchen could put up its own fruit in quart cans rather than buying it in. What the recipe does not contain is any account of why the boiling works: processing times were inherited craft knowledge rather than tested schedules. The shift to glass jars with separate lids, and eventually to published time-and-temperature tables from agricultural extension services, made home canning both verifiable and lead-free, and left entries like this one as a document rather than a set of instructions.