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Preserved Pears
Mrs. Midgley.
To six pounds of pears, four pounds of sugar, two coffee cups of water, the juice of two lemons, and the rind of one, a handful of whole ginger; boil all together for twenty minutes, then put in your pears and boil till soft, say about a quarter of an hour; take them out and boil your syrup a little longer; then put back your fruit and give it a boil; bottle whilst hot ; add a little cochineal to give them a nice colour.
The preserve itself is a sound piece of Victorian confectionery — pears poached in a heavy ginger-and-lemon syrup — but the instruction to "bottle whilst hot" is open-kettle canning, and that is where it fails by current standards. The notes below explain the recipe's terms and the specific problem with its storage.
- Why the sealing method failsFilling jars with hot syrup and capping them was believed to sterilise the contents, but it does not. The headspace, the jar rim and the underside of the lid never reach a holding temperature, and the vacuum formed on cooling is unreliable. Any jar that fails to seal, or seals weakly, spoils without warning.
- Pears sit on the wrong side of the acid linePears sit close to the acid line -- Pears generally test somewhere in the range of pH 3.5 to 4.6, usually below but not far from the 4.6 threshold under which Clostridium botulinum is reliably suppressed. The lemon juice here is not a measured acidification — two lemons of unstated size across six pounds of fruit — so the finished pH is unknown. Sugar alone does not make a preserve shelf-stable at this water content.
- No processing time or temperature is givenThe recipe specifies no boiling-water bath, no jar preparation and no storage conditions. If you want to put up pears, use a current tested recipe with measured acidification and a stated processing time for your jar size and altitude.
- Coffee cupAn unstandardised Victorian measure, generally somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a full cup. Two coffee cups is therefore something like a cup and a half to two cups of water, but the original is genuinely imprecise here.
- Whole gingerDried whole ginger root, the hard knobbly kind sold for pickling and preserving, not fresh green ginger and not ground. "A handful" would be perhaps an ounce or two, bruised so it gives up its heat, and presumably lifted out before bottling, though the recipe does not say so.
- CochinealCarmine, made from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect. It is still a legal food colouring and still in use, but it is an animal product and a recognised allergen for a small number of people. Victorian cooks reached for it because boiled pears go a dull straw colour.
- The pears themselvesA firm, slightly underripe cooking pear is what this expects — the fruit has to survive boiling till soft and then a return to the pan for a final boil. A soft dessert pear collapses into the syrup long before the quarter hour is up.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why nearly every entry carries a name — Mrs. Midgley here — rather than an author's voice. Preserving pears in a ginger-and-lemon syrup was standard autumn work in a household with a tree or a barrel of fruit and no refrigeration; the sugar, at two-thirds the weight of the fruit, was doing the preserving, and the whole ginger and lemon rind were there for flavour. The cochineal at the end is a small window on Victorian expectations: a pale, honest-looking pear was thought to look poorly. Open-kettle bottling of this kind was near-universal in nineteenth-century domestic manuals and remained common well into the twentieth century, long after the bacteriology that condemned it was understood.