ISSUE 55, FRUIT & FLAVOR, Part 1: Pear Wars
Pear Wars
In the 1880s a taste war broke out among the high priesthood of American horticulture. At the center of the controversy were two hybrid pears—the LeConte and the Keiffer—natural crosses between the European (Pyrus communis) pears and Asian (Pyris pyrifolia) pears. Most American fruit savants had formed their taste on European varieties such as the Anjou or the Doyenne d’Ete. These had a buttery texture when tree ripened, and a melting, rich taste. Yet numbers of pomologists had imported varieties of the hard Asian pears, which generically earned the name ‘sand pears’ to determine their virtues. Naturalist Louis LeConte was one of these, who sought pear varieties that could be grown in the deep South. Most European Pear varieties needed 350 to 400 chill hours to ripen and mellow. The Asian varieties grew in warmer climes. Soon growers of the hard Asian “cooking pears” discovered other virtues—immunity to Pear blight, a capacity to resist the depredations of the curculio insect.
In the later 1880s a LeConte Pear boom swept the South. The development of a market for both the LeConte and Keiffer Pears—an occurrence certified in 1883 when the American Pomological Society consented to list the LeConte as an approved variety—inspired a paper war on both pears that would last a generation. It began with the denunciations of America’s senior pomologist Charles Mason Hove y (who nearly singlehandedly established the northern strawberry industry) to Ulysses Hedrick, chronicler of the various fruits of New York early in the twentieth century. They faulted both hybrids because they did not ripen on the tree, but were picked unripe and stored in warehouses to mellow. Some never ate a properly prepared LeConte or Keiffer. Here is the tale of both pears which are still grown in southern states, still cherished for canning, cooking, and, yes, eating out hand when properly mellowed. Here are profiles of both of the controversial hybrids.
LeConte Pear
A natural cross between a European and an Asian Pear, this bell-shaped custard yellow pear was promoted by Major John Eatton LeConte after its initial fruiting in Liberty County Georgia in1856. (William Parry, Forty Years in Pear Growing (1880), 10-11.) Major LeConte’s father, the naturalist Louis LeConte, had planted numbers of pear varieties at Woodmasten plantation before his death in 1838. Two of these varieties gave rise to the tree from which all LeConte Pears derived.
Suited to the warm conditions of the deep South, the LeConte became a favorite orchard tree among those who wished a variety more tender and more suitable for fresh eating than the Asian sand pear. The greatest virtue of the variety was its adaptability to nearly eveyr climate zone in the United States, from North Florida to Michigan. Propagated by cuttings, the LeConte Pear requires a pollinator partner of another pear variety to set fruit. It proved somewhat blight resistant, and prolific in most settings. When properly ripened it proved a strong market variety in the South. While eaten fresh, its great virtue was as a cooking and canning variety.
The LeConte Pear enjoyed a boom in popularity in the period after the Civil War with many hundreds of acres cultivated in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida, South and North Carolina (“The LeConte Pear Boom,” Southern Agriculturist (December 1, 1882), 7). Commercial Pear culture in the South can be said to date to the general embrace of this variety during the Reconstruction era. Indeed, the hunger for cuttings became so pronounced that some carelessness attended the selection of plant material and certain trees were found to be inferior bearers {“A New Race of Pears—the Oriental,” American Agriculturist (November 1884), 501-02.) The variety’s resistance to blight proved to be modest, and the Kieffer Pear, another Asian-European cross, supplanted it in numbers of southern orchards in the 1890s because of its greater blight resistance.
“A remarkable grower, large and beautiful; early and prolific. Fruit large, belle-shaped, creamy yellow, juicy, not very rich. A good shipper; grown in the South for the Northern markets, where it is in demand and usually brings good prices” {Cherokee Nursery Catalogue (Waycross, GA, 1893), 11).
Kieffer Pear
The pear was a natural cross between an Asian Sand Bear and a Bartlett discovered nurseryman Peter Kieffer outside of Philadelphia in 1868. The Kieffer Pear made its public debut in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, where the fruit committee commended it as harbinger of “a new race of pears of great excellence” (“Kieffer’s Hybrid Pear,” The American Farmer (March 1880), 101). The promise that hung about the pear emanated from one virtue of the pear particularly—its immunity to the pear blight that was ravaging the orchards of America in the mid-nineteenth century. The Kieffer possessed the qualities that made Americans grow the hard Sand Pears—productivity, ornamental beauty, and vigor. But it was less hard, less late in the season and more dulcet when processed. So as orchard after orchard of Anjou and Doyenne d’Ete pears expired, the Kieffer appeared as the best option forward. Pomologist Charles Downing insisted it was “of very good quality,” the editor of the American Farmmer offer the following laudatory tasting notes: “Flesh fine grained, juicy, sugar and aromatic. T. Meechan siad he equaled any he had every eaten in terms of “luciousness.” But it did not have the buttery quality when eaten fresh plucked from the tree of a European Pear. It needed to be mellowed some weeks in a storage house for it to come to full quality. For Charles M. Hovey this was an unforgiveable liability. He insisted it was inferior to all 800+ pear varieties he had tasted in his career as judge of the American Pomological Association, , including the rejected varieites.
The agricultural jourals of the 1880s were filled with articles such as “The Kieffer Pear. Conflicting Opinions” (The Rural New Yorkers Report of 1883). It responded to terroir in ways more changeable than other pears in the estimation of many. (It was determined that it prospered to slightly acidic well drained soils; that it needed more than 350 Chill hours.) It tasted better than the Sand Pear—most agreed on that—but lacked the luciousness and melting quality of the Anjou, the hallmark of taste.
But pears have more culinary value that being consumed out of hand—and as a cooking pear, a pickling pear, and as a mash pear for Perry the Kieffer proved its worth decade after decade.