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Ginger Pears (Delicious sweetmeat Use a hard)
Ginger pears are a delicious sweetmeat. Use a hard pear; peel, core and cut the fruit into very thin slices. For eight pounds of fruit after it has been sliced, use the same quantity of sugar, the juice of four lemons, pint of water and half a pound of ginger root sliced thin. Cut the lemon rinds into as long and thin strips as possible. Place all together in a preserving kettle and boil slowly for an hour.
A straightforward equal-weight preserve, but written for a household putting up half a bushel of hard pears at a time. Scale it down and watch the pot rather than the clock.
- Choose a genuinely hard pearThis wants a firm, dense, low-juice fruit -- Bosc, Seckel, Kieffer, or Bartlett picked well short of ripe. A ripe supermarket pear collapses into sauce long before the hour is up.
- Scale the batchEight pounds of sliced fruit plus eight pounds of sugar fills a very large kettle. A quarter batch -- 2 lb fruit, 2 lb sugar, 1 lemon, 1/2 cup water, 2 oz ginger -- behaves better on a domestic burner.
- Half a pound of gingerThis means fresh ginger root, not ground. It is an assertive amount; cut back to 2-3 oz per 8 lb if you want the pear to lead. Slice it paper-thin, since the slices stay in the jar.
- Pint of waterTwo cups. It is only there to start the sugar dissolving before the pears release their own juice -- add it first and stir over low heat until the syrup is clear, then bring up the temperature.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan -- stainless or enamelled. Wide matters more than deep, since evaporation is what thickens this. Copper or bare aluminium will react with the lemon juice.
- "Boil slowly for an hour"A steady simmer, stirred often once the syrup thickens, or the sugar will catch and darken. Judge by the syrup rather than the clock: it is done when it sheets off a spoon and reads about 220F, and the pear slices have gone translucent.
- The lemon rindPare the strips with a vegetable peeler and leave the white pith behind; pith turns the syrup bitter over an hour of boiling. Some cooks blanch the strips in a change of water first for the same reason.
- Keeping itThe recipe stops at the boil and says nothing about sealing, as period books often assumed the reader knew. Ladle into clean jars and refrigerate, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath schedule for pear preserves rather than the old practice of hot syrup and a paraffin seal.
Ginger pears turn up in American preserving chapters from the late nineteenth century onward, and one likely reason is horticultural: households had access to hard, gritty, keeping pears that were poor eating out of hand but excellent under sugar. The Kieffer, an Asian-European hybrid generally traced to Peter Kieffer, a nurseryman near Philadelphia, around 1863, who crossed a sand pear with a European pear, spread widely for exactly this reason and is the sort of fruit a book like this assumed. Ginger root and lemons were both reliable staples in the grocer's stock by 1900. "Sweetmeat" is the older term for any sugar confection or candied fruit, and preserves of this kind are often said to have been served with cold meats, at tea, or spooned over plain cake rather than treated strictly as jam for bread.