Pear Preserves and Pear Butter

[George Collins]

Last year I spent a day with an elderly lady that I befriended through the course of my then-job. The purpose of that particular visit was to learn how to make pear preserves. I could have easily found a recipe online but this way was much more fun. Not because canning pears with little ol ladies is necessarily fun but for the fact that this particular lil ol lady had a neighbor that owned a pot bellied pig. A pot bellied pig that was allowed free run of the neighborhood. A pot bellied pig that while on its rounds came for a visit and attacked my wife's feet and in doing so nipped both of her little toes there by prompting much dancing.

But I did learn how to make pear preserves so yesterday I picked a pear from the only tree in my forest garden that bore fruit this year. It turned loose in a manner indicating perfect ripeness so we cleaned the tree of its fruit and gathered many more from Youngblood's trees. Here's the recipe as she taught it to me:

Wash, peel, slice and core about five-gallons of pears.

Place a layer of pears in the bottom of a large stock pot.

Cover the pears with a bunch of sugar.

Continue adding layers of pears and layers of sugar until you run out of either pears or sugar or room in the pot.

Put the pot on the smallest burner you have turned to the lowest heat setting possible.

Let it remain there uncovered for several (about 4) hours until the juice gets to the desired viscosity.

Jar them puppies up.

Yield: A bunch.

To my taste, only mayhaw jelly is better (which she taught me how to make also).

This morning, after feeding the hogs, we turned our attention once again to pears. A friend of mine sent me a jar of homemade apple butter last year and I liked it bunches. That got me to thinking about substituting pears for apples knowing that for many recipes, apples and pears are interchangeable. I did a quick Internet search and found that pears are in fact a viable substitute for apples in this regard as well. I texted my friend and he gave me a link to the recipe he used. Here tis:


I used a kid-powered sausage grinder to prepare the pear sauce and it worked fabulously.

The pears are cooking down in a crockpot right now and will not be finished until perhaps tomorrow.

I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

If the licks from the stirring spoon are any indication, looks like we may have found another winner.

One thing I do know for sure though, the water drained off the pears after boiling them, with a little added sweetener, tasted exquisite.

[mannytheseacow]

We don't get apples or pears up in this neck of the woods for a while yet but I've got tomatoes coming out of my ears! What you're making sounds like what another sweet little old lady (my granny) taught me to make when I was a kid: tomato butter. Same idea. layer tomatoes and sugar and simmer it down. If you want to get fancy peel the tomatoes and take out the seeds, or run them through a juicer. Either way... delicious! I'm dreaming about some soured flatbread cooked on my rocket stove this winter tandoori style and cracking open a jar of tomato butter.... oh, about January 25......

[George Collins]

Manny, I read your post, visualized that recipe, smelled sourdough biscuits, tore one in half, put some soft butter on it while it was still steaming, drenched it in a spoonful of your granny's tomato butter and licked my screen.