Pear Preserves with Walnuts and Raisins

This is the first of a pair of pear recipes I've worked up in the past week. Both rely on the natural comraderie between pears and walnuts, but then I called in two very different charismatic accomplices. In the first instance—certainly the more conventional—I added a few brandy-soaked raisins for a jam that's as reassuringly familiar as an old college friend. It's good company. Then I tried something new with the addition of wild fennel seeds foraged from the canyons. The results this time were worldly and thrilling, like an encounter with a stranger from the Old World.

Let's start with the old friend. PEAR PRESERVES WITH WALNUTS AND RAISINS is abundant, complex and a bit nostalgic—truly a jam that saves the season.

Back in the spring and summer, I tried to make jams that took a single fruit and expressed its singular flavor. The goal was a simple jam—strawberry or apricot—but the best version of it you've ever tasted. When I experimented with supplemental flavors, such as adding elderflower to strawberries or gin to blueberries, my goal was only to intensify the fruit, to restore some of the vibrancy of the raw ingredient to the cooked product. Anyone tasting those jams would have been hard pressed to decipher the secret ingredient. That was by design: as I wrote in an earlier post, I wanted the supplemental flavor to come across as a suggestion, not a declaration.

Now I'm trying to cram many flavors into a single jar. Why, I wonder?

One answer is easy: the fall harvest offers a bounty that includes not just the ancient autumnal fruits—apples and pears—but also nuts and dried foodstuffs such as raisins. "What grows together, goes together" holds true. For me the taste of fall is a composed salad of bitter greens like chicory or dandelion with slivered pears, toasted almond slices and new raisins. Preserve that concept as a jam and what you have is the topping for winter's oatmeal breakfast—pears, walnuts and raisins brought together with honey

But there's something else, I think. The fall harvest is rich in elemental tastes that evoke our own memories—of eating raisins in kindergarten, for instance—and equally connect to our deepest collective roots as a civilization. Grapes, apples, pears and nuts have fed humankind since we were nothing more than scattered bands of hunter-gatherers roaming the unsettled creation of pre-history. I'd suggest that my urge to lay by a store of sweet fruit and fatty nuts must go back as far.

Outside my window at Greenvalley, the squirrels have been burying acorns. In the kitchen I'm doing my version of same; it's time to pack the cupboards with everything that grows. This preserve is like an autumn cornucopia in a jar: honeyed pears, freshly hulled walnut and new-crop raisins—three kinds of sweetness—all enlived by threads of lemon zest.

PEAR PRESERVES WITH WALNUTS AND RAISINS

3 lbs ripe bartlett pears

REVISED 1 1/4 cup sugar

REVISED 1/4 cup honey (or more to taste)

1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnut

1/2 cup raisins

about 1/4 cup brandy, rum or wine

zest of 1/2 lemon

REVISED juice of 1/2 lemon

1 Plump the raisins by soaking them overnight in your alcohol of choice.

2 The next day, peel and core the pears. (You'll have about 2 pounds of prepared fruit.) Slice into small cubes and toss with juice of a half lemon to prevent browning.

3 Combine pears, honey and sugar in a preserving pan and bring to a boil. Skim the foam thrown off by the honey and cook at a steady boil for 5 to 7 minutes.

4 As the mixture begins to thicken, add strained raisins (not the liquor) and walnuts. Continue reducing for perhaps 5 minutes more until a jell-set is achieved, then add the lemon zest and, if you like, a little more lemon juice to taste. Return to a brief boil, ladle into prepared jars and seal.

5 Process in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes.

YIELD

3 pounds of pears yielded just over 1.5 pints

Comments

[Catherine]

I just made this pear walnut preserves recipe. It's delicious - rich and with a wonderful combination of flavors. My yield was also 1 1/2 pints. I soaked the raisins in pear brandy. I found it took about 45 minutes of cooking to get up to 222 degrees. Maybe I was too cautious about avoiding scorching.

But the preserves are a bit too sweet for my taste. I think the sweetness is threatening to mask the other flavors.

I'd like to make this recipe again. What if I reduced the sugar to 1 1/2 cups and used all the lemon juice?

[Kevin West]

Hi Catherine --

Many thanks for your comment. I entirely agree about the sugar -- in the two years since I originally posted this recipe, I have used progressively less sugar. Pears, in particular, are already sweet and don't have much acid, so I really dial back the sugar to below my now-standard ratio of 1 pound prepped fruit to 1 cup of sugar.

For 3 pounds of pears, I'd suggest using 1 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup honey. That's a lot less, I know, but I bet it will be more to your taste (and mine!). I'll amend the recipe above.

Also -- I normally wouldn't reduce pear jam to 222 degrees. I'd stop well before then, which is to say before a gel set. I like pear jam to be oozy. The more you reduce a jam, the sweeter it will become.

So that's my feedback. I hope you will try the revised approach and let me know how you like the results!

my best,
kevin

[Catherine]

Kevin,

Thanks for the quick response. I'll try your suggested changes within the next week or so. (All the pears for sale in my area are as hard as rocks and will need time to ripen.)

What would you suggest for a temperature? I hate to sound neurotic, but I'm new to canning. I have a lot of candy-making experience though, and I know that with candy a difference of just 2 degrees can have a big impact on the end result. So I hover over the thermometer.

Thanks!

[Catherine]

Hi Kevin,

The second time I made this, I used your revised proportions of 1 1/4 cups sugar and 1/4 cup honey. I liked the taste, but the jam turned out gray, not the nice golden color of the first recipe. You really had to eat it with your eyes closed! Gray pear jam/anything just doesn't work for me, I'm afraid.

So I tried a third time, thinking the honey might determine the color. I used 1 1/4 cups sugar and 1/2 cup honey. I noticed that things turned gray when I added the raisins. However, as I continued to cook the mixture the honey-gold color returned. I put the raisins in when the temp reached 210. I stopped cooking at 215. It took a while to go from 210 to 215. (I'm at sea level, btw.)

The third time was the charm. The jam is a lovely gold. It's easily spreadable without being runny. The pear flavor comes through beautifully; it's a sweet jam (ripe pears are sweet, after all) but not too sweet to mask the pears.

Some side notes:
It still took a total cooking time of about 45 minutes. I cooked at a gentle boil, stirring constantly.

The first and second times I chopped the pears into cubes by hand. That was a lot of work - they're slippery. So the third time I used the food processor. The food processor gave me pieces of various sizes, some quite small. The result was that the third jam was more of a traditional jam consistency. The hand-chopped versions were more of a preserve - fruit chunks held together by syrup.

All in all, this is a delicious recipe. Definitely a keeper. I'll be making a few more batches in the next two weeks to give as Christmas gifts.

I'm looking forward to your cookbook.