Suzie Homemaker Attack

Day 356: Here you see the product of a Suzie Homemaker Attack. When the kudzu of the Pacific Northwest (blackberries) failed to produce its usual lavish crop of fruit and my urge to make jam had yet to be satisfied, I began thinking about what other recipes I had for breakfast spreads. My larder was populated by half a dozen jars of blackberry jam and a dozen or so of cranberry-orange marmalade, so those were out, and I didn't want to make a chutney because I still had "Dinosaur chutney" on the shelves. What would I be most likely to eat? Pear-ginger preserves!

As a general rule, I don't like to cook, or maybe I should say that I don't like to cook meals. I love to bake and I love to make jams, jellies and preserves, two things which go wonderfully hand-in-hand. Over the course of two days, I turned eight big Bartlett pears into fifteen half-pints and four 4-ounce jars of preserves, a more time-consuming project than jamming.

To make preserves (think of big, almost-candied strawberry chunks), the fruit must first be cooked until tender. Then sugar is added and the mixture is brought to a boil. It is then removed from the heat and allowed to cool slowly to room temperature over a period of several hours (five in this case). In jam, the fruit pieces would be smaller than in preserves and could therefore be put into jars following the addition of pectin; slow cooling allows larger pieces of fruit to be "preserved" without being destroyed by more vigorous cooking.

Once the mixture has cooled, a little lemon juice is added to prevent browning of the fruit and it is returned to the boil for several minutes. After it has been removed from the heat, the pectin is added. The preserves must then be stirred for ten minutes to ensure that the fruit chunks do not "float" to the top of the jar.

The remainder of the process is simple: the preparation is decanted into sterilized jars, capped and sealed, and put into a water-bath for 10 minutes. Some old-fashioned canners omit the water-bath step, but most modern recipes recommend it.

Pear-ginger preserves are quite sweet, and go best on homemade breads with a stronger grainy flavour, like whole wheat. I am particularly fond of this preserve on my "birdseed" bread, made with millet flour and golden flaxseed meal.