Making Pear Butter

There are a couple of things that come to mind when I think of the Augusts of my childhood and youth.

One is that the beginning of August marked the countdown to going back to school. The other is that it was the month when the pears were ready to be dealt with. Neither was something that I looked forward to.

It's kinda funny to think about. For as much as I hated school, I'm still a student … a perpetual student. Maybe not in the traditional sense but a student nonetheless. Particularly where old time self-reliance skills are concerned. And I'm still fooling with pears. Not in the volume that we did when I was a kid growing up on a hardscrabble farm growing and processing practically everything we ate.

We'd spend all morning peeling and slicing pears … for several days in a row … then spend the afternoon ... for said number of days ... packing pears in jars to can in a 55 gallon drum over a fire or sweating over an old smokey wood stove making pear butter. My job, after all the morning work, was to keep the fire just right under the drum or stoke the stove and stir those huge pans in a building that was already August hot without a wood stove going.

We canned about every fruit and vegetable imaginable in that drum. Ate well. And we all lived to tell about it.

These storms and wind this week knocked some pears off our little tree so it was time to do something with them … turn them into biscuit topping.

The 4-quart pot was heaped. I mean really rounded up to the point that slices were beginning to fall off.

One of the things you have to be careful of with cooking down pears is the heat. Keep it low or you're apt to scorch the bottom of the pot. When that happens you have a mess to deal with throughout the entire process. The scorched junk keeps scratching off and mixing with the butter. Those scorched spots also create hot spots that will keep on scorching regardless of your efforts to keep things stirred.

Stirred?

A lot of stirring. Forget about using a large spoon. It's best to use something flat that will work evenly against the bottom of the pot. We used what looked like miniature wooden flat tipped boat paddles that my dad made to stir those pans on the wood stove. Also avoid using any kind of pot that isn't flat on the bottom. You have to be able to get at everything to keep it from sticking and scorching.

It takes a good measure of time to slowly cook the pears down. There's a lot of water in them that has to be evaporated out. Sometimes, if the pears are really hard like these from our tree, you have to add a little water a time or two to finish cooking them down in order to either mash the heck out of them with a potato masher or use a hand blender to reduce the chunks. The finished product doesn't have to be as smooth as apply butter. In fact, a little chunkiness gives the pear butter a nice texture … adds some chewability to it.

To this one gallon pot that started out super heaping full, I added 2 cups of sugar after the cooked down pears were given a good mashing. That 2 cups of sugar makes this sized batch sweet enough for our tastes.

Spices?

This is one of those areas that is also open to individual taste. We are partial to using Allspice and Cinnamon. How much of each?

That's a hard question to answer.

I never once saw my dad measure anything when he was making pear butter. He'd dump some of this … then taste it. If it needed more of this for his taste he'd add more. Then he'd work on the that after the same fashion. I pretty much follow the same process that I learned from my Czech dad … get it to taste good to me and go with it. The main thing is to go at it a little at a time, taste, and make whatever adjustments are needed.

It's easy to scorch the pears before adding the sugar. It's even easier after the sugar is added. Mainly because, at this point, you need to turn up the heat a good bit to caramelize the sugar, get the butter up to a good simmer, and hold it there for a while. Once the sugar is added and the heat is turned up there is no walking away from what you are doing. The entire world has to be put on hold while you constantly stir and keep slowly increasing the heat a tad bit at a time until you can't keep the boil stirred down.

Had I been putting this batch into quart sized jars I would not have bothered with the water bath as the final step. This stuff is seething hot when it goes into the prepared jars. I've never had a problem with quarts sealing.

Pints are half the volume and cool quicker so I wanted to make sure the product in the pint jars was hot enough to pull a seal on the lids when they cooled.

The water in the bath has to be at least as hot as the jars when you set them into it.

Colder and it may crack the hot jars.

Set the jars in, bring it up to a low boil, reduce the heat enough to keep things at a low boil, put the lid on and let it do it's thing for five minutes or so. Set it off the heat and let it set another five minutes or so before removing the jars and snugging the lids just a little. You want the lids snug but not wrenched down hard as you can turn them.

As the jars cool, they pull a vacuum on the lid producing that unmistakable tink. Once sealed and completely cooled down, the rings can be removed from the jars, given a good washing, and stored away.