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Pear Jam
Peel twenty-five pounds sound, fresh, ripe pears, cut in quarters, remove seeds, cores and stems, then prepare exactly the same as apricot jam.
The instruction is a cross-reference: the pears are simply substituted into the book's apricot jam method, which in this period means roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar, macerated and then boiled down. A few things need translating before you start.
- Scale it downTwenty-five pounds of pears is a commercial batch aimed at filling a cellar shelf, and it will not cook evenly in a domestic pot. Work in batches of 4-5 lb of prepared fruit in a wide, heavy pan; deep narrow pots steam rather than reduce.
- The sugar the recipe does not stateTurn-of-the-century jam ratios ran from equal weight sugar to fruit down to about three-quarters. Weigh the peeled, cored fruit; three-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound is less cloying than the full measure, though with a low-pectin fruit like pear the heavier sugar sets more easily.
- Pears need help settingPears are low in acid and not especially rich in pectin, more so than apricots on both counts. Add the juice of one lemon per 2 lb of fruit; without it the jam is likelier to stay syrupy and to darken.
- Choose the right pear"Sound, fresh, ripe" is doing real work here. A firm pear such as Kieffer or Bosc holds its shape and flavour; Bartlett, the standard American canning pear, cooks down much softer, and a dead-ripe dessert pear collapses into sweet mush with little character. Slightly underripe fruit carries more pectin.
- Judge the set by temperatureCook at a full rolling boil, stirring often as it thickens, until it reaches 220F at sea level, or until a spoonful wrinkles when pushed on a chilled plate. Pear jam scorches easily in the last few minutes.
- SealingThe original assumes hot jars sealed and stored in a cool cellar. Fill clean hot jars to 1/4 inch of the rim, wipe, seal, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; because pears sit near the upper edge of the acid range, the added lemon juice matters for keeping as well as for texture.
- YieldFigure on the order of one and a half to two half-pint jars per pound of prepared fruit once the sugar is in; the full 25 lb as written would run to several dozen half-pints.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built *The International Cook Book* (1906) as an exhaustive alphabetical reference, and the terseness here reflects its habit of treating preserves as variations on a single method, sending the cook back to an earlier entry rather than repeating it in full. Pears were a common household preserving fruit, and the low acidity that makes them awkward for modern canners was offset by heavy sugar and cool, dark storage. Quantities of this size suggest the book was written with professional and institutional kitchens in view as well as domestic ones.