Pear Preserve Ohio
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Today we continue a series on canning recipes from a 1929 edition of the Afro-American published the last summer before the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. The name on today’s recipe does the historical work. The Baltimore based Afro-American printed a pear preserve and called it Ohio, and its readers understood the reference, because Ohio sat at the end of one of the main routes out of the South and thousands of families in the Afro-American's circulation area had relatives in Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo. Recipes moved along the same rail lines people did. George Washington Carver had urged every farmer to keep a few peach, pear, plum, fig, and apple trees, arguing that a handful of well-tended trees fed a household and left something to sell, and pears rewarded that advice better than most fruit because they keep hard for weeks after picking and can wait for the cook. The long cooking here — two to three hours, until the fruit turns a dark red — is not fussiness. It drives off water, concentrates the sugar, and produces a jar that holds through a winter without refrigeration, which was the whole point in a house that had none.
Pear Preserve Ohio
Ingredients
Pears, pared and quartered
Sugar, ¾ cup to each cup of water
Water
Stick cinnamon
Directions
Make a liberal supply of rich syrup, using three-fourths cup of sugar to each cup of water, and boil it from three to five minutes. Drop in the pared and quartered pears along with a few pieces of stick cinnamon. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and cook gently from two to three hours, until the fruit turns a dark, rich red. Can and seal.
"Summer Fruits for Winter Use," Afro-American, August 31, 1929, 13.
