Home Canned Pears

We used the Ball Blue Book of canning recipe for canned pears. We chose to make a 30% sugar syrup (a light syrup) and we pre-treated the pears with Fruit Fresh. In each jar we put one small piece of cinnamon (bark brought back from India as a gift to Lisa and Mark by their very good friend Frank) and two cloves. The real secret though is the addition of vanilla bean to the sugar syrup for the simmering of the pears. Lisa had some vanilla beans she bought for something else but didn't use so she thought it might be a nice addition to the recipe. It infused the pears with just a slight warm vanilla flavor that I believe has transformed the pears into something superior to all other canned fruit.

If this sounds good to you but you don't want to do a canning project to taste them, you don't have to. Just make a sugar syrup by combining 2 1/4 cups sugar with 5 1/4 cups water* in a sauce pan. Add a couple of pieces of vanilla bean, a stick of cinnamon, and a couple of whole cloves to the sugar syrup while you heat it up. Once the syrup has begun to simmer, add to it a single layer of pears quartered and peeled. Let it simmer for five minutes. Five minutes is sufficient to cook them, but you can cook them for another ten or fifteen minutes if you want the pears to be more strongly flavored by the spices.

Ways you can eat them:

• stick your fork in the pan and spear yourself a pear (warning: you'll keep doing this until they are completely gone if you don't exercise extreme caution)

• arrange the pears in a pretty dish and add a dollop of whipped cream on top

• add a few slices to some unsweetened yogurt for breakfast

• make some individual tart shells, fill with vanilla custard, arrange the pears on top, don't share with anyone.

We canned fifty pounds of pears with a yield of seventeen quarts. But I just don't think that's enough. I promised myself that this project was it, NO MORE CANNING FOR THIS FARM-GIRL. If I don't make more of these pears I might go into a decline. People don't go into declines much these days which makes it dangerous because no one knows what to do for you. I might start lounging around on couches holding smelling salts and pulling a modern day Camille. That won't be pretty. I'm bound to get clobbered on the head by someone (I always hated Camille and thought she needed a real good smack in the head.) I'm thinking the only way to save my reputation as a sensible down-to-earth person is to make more of these pears. Don't you?


*I made up six batches of the syrup to can the fifty pounds of pears