Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Pears, Asian
Pears and Quinces
Most of the fruits we eat today are modern varieties, genetically selected for commercial
agricultural qualities such as shipability, size, color and easy growing. Usually, anything de-
veloped even fifty years ago is relegated to the status of "heirloom," as fleeting and scarce
as a Duncan Phyfe highboy. That's not the case with pears. In fact, almost every pear variety
you've ever eaten is a genuine antique, dating back more than a hundred years. Although
there has been some fine-tuning, the household names in peardom have been the same since
the middle of the nineteenth century.
The father of the modern pear was a Belgian named Nicolas Hardenpont, who began
his work around 1730. Before him, nearly all pears had crisp flesh, more like that of Asian
pears than the buttery, melting flesh we so appreciate today. The breeding of pears, like that
of apples, is accomplished largely by the propagation of sports - chance genetic mutations
that are then refined by horticulturists. So enthusiastic were the Belgians about their pear
breeding that, according to one fruit historian, they "seemed to have been quite carried off
their feet by [it], and during the first half of the nineteenth century, a fad like the `tulip
craze' of Holland reigned in the country."
The Bose, that long-necked Gwyneth Paltrow of pears, was developed by Hardenpont's
successor, Jean Baptiste Van Mons, in 1807. The commercial workhorse, the Bartlett, came
from En gland, where it was found in a Berkshire church garden in 1770. In London the
trees were sold by an orchardist named Williams, who named the variety after himself. (The
Bartlett is still called the Williams pear in Europe.) When it came to America, it was re-
named by Enoch Bartlett, who began selling it in this country in 1817.
The great American pear, the Seckel, probably originated strictly by chance. It seems
that every fall around the beginning of the eighteenth century, a Philadelphia-area hunter
named Dutch Jacob used to return from his rounds with the most delicious pears, the source
of which he never divulged. He eventually bought the land on which they grew but soon
sold it to a man named Seckel, who introduced the pear to the public. The original tree
stood until at least 1870. Since it is so different from any native American fruit, it's thought
to be a genetic mutation that sprang from the seed of a Rousselet de Reims pear brought
over by German settlers.
