Home › Preserves › Ginger Pears (Four pounds of hard pears)
Ginger Pears (Four pounds of hard pears)
Four pounds of hard pears, after they are pared and cored, four pounds of sugar, four good-sized lemons, four ounces of green ginger root. Peel off the yellow rind from the lemons, and cook until tender; then chop very fine; squeeze the juice from the lemons. Scrape the skin from the ginger root and chop very fine; chop the pears. Mix the ingredients and cook three or four hours over a slow fire. Put in jelly glasses or small jars.
A straightforward equal-weights preserve, but two things in it need translating: "green ginger" and the three-to-four-hour cooking time.
- Green ginger rootThis means fresh ginger, as opposed to the dried or crystallised forms a Victorian pantry also stocked. Four ounces is a substantial knob; scrape rather than peel thickly, so as to waste as little as possible of the flesh directly under the skin.
- Hard pearsThe recipe wants underripe or firm cooking pears — Bosc, Seckel, or the Kieffer widely planted in American yards in this period — not soft Bartletts, which collapse into sauce. Four pounds is the weight after paring and coring, so start with about five pounds.
- Equal weightsFour pounds of sugar to four pounds of fruit is a 1:1 preserve, which is what gives it keeping quality and a thick, translucent set. Reducing the sugar substantially will give you a looser, more perishable conserve.
- The lemon rindOnly the yellow zest is used, simmered in water until it is soft enough to chop finely. Skip the tenderising step and you get tough shreds of peel that never soften in the sugar syrup.
- Cooking timeThree or four hours reflects the recipe's "slow fire." In a heavy modern pot over low heat, expect somewhere between 1 and 2 hours; judge by the preserve, not the clock.
- How to know it is doneThe syrup should sheet from a spoon and read about 220F on a candy thermometer, and the pear pieces should be translucent and amber. Stir often in the last half hour, when equal-weight sugar scorches readily.
- Filling the jars"Jelly glasses" were sealed with paraffin wax, which is no longer recommended. Fill sterilised half-pint jars, leaving a quarter-inch headspace, and either process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes or simply refrigerate the jars and use within a few months.
- YieldA large batch, on the order of eight to ten half-pint jars. It is stiff and strongly spiced — meant for spooning onto bread or serving beside cold meat rather than eating by the bowl.
Ginger pears belong to the end-of-season preserving of the American late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household with a yard might have a pear tree whose crop was hard, gritty fruit unsuited to eating out of hand. The Kieffer pear, widely planted in that period for its vigour and disease resistance, was coarse raw and was commonly recommended for canning and preserving instead — recipes like this one, with heavy sugar, lemon, and enough fresh ginger to dominate, were one answer to it. The distinction between "green ginger" and dried or preserved ginger was worth spelling out at the time, since imported Canton preserved ginger in syrup was a familiar grocery item and would have behaved quite differently here. Ginger pear preserve turns up in similar proportions in cookbooks of the era.