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Subject: Pear drops candy From: Lynda Date: 5/15/2021, 8:09 AM To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com On 5/15/2021 6:18 AM, Lynda wrote: I need to find a recipe for pear drops made with pear juice. Dicks sweets used to sell them when I was a young child, before they became commercialized and became artificially favoured. My granny also used to make them, but unfortunately the recipe died with her. Kindest regards, Lynda
Hi Lynda,
"Pear Drops" are a popular "boiled sweet" (Americans call it "hard candy") in the UK. Commercial pear drops get their flavor from an artificial flavoring called isoamyl acetate, also known as "banana oil." Recipes for homemade pear drops are scarce these days. The difficulty in making them without using artificial flavoring is that it is very difficult to get enough pear flavor in a small boiled sweet by using real pears or pear juice. There is a recipe for homemade boiled sweets here, and pear is one of the flavors mentioned, but the recipe just says "extract" or "flavoring" it does not tell you how to make the flavoring from fresh pears. See: Make Old-Fashioned Hard Candy
There is a book called "Great British Sweets: And How To Make Them at Home" by Adele Nozedar, published by Square Peg (£12.99), which has a recipe for "pear drops" in it. You can buy the book at several places, but I don't have the book and I have no idea what it uses to obtain the pear flavoring. It might call for artificial pear flavoring. There is an article about the book here: Bake Your Own Retro Sweets
You can purchase that book at a bookstore or from these sites:
So, there are multiple recipes for making fruit-flavored boiled sweets available online, but I had no success finding one that tells you how to make a pear flavoring from fresh pears or pear juice that would be strongly flavored enough to use in making pear drops without using artificial flavoring.
There are some natural pear flavorings available, such as this one, but without a recipe for using it to make pear drops, you won't know if it will work or how much to use. You would have to use guesswork and experiment. See: Natural Pear Flavoring
If you look for "pear flavoring" you may find other brands of natural pear flavoring to choose from.
While searching, I found a recipe for "pear jelly candy." This appears to be more like "jelly babies" candy, soft rather than hard like pear drops. Maybe like "gum drops." I give you this as an alternative, if nothing else works out: Pear Jelly Candies
I hope you find something useful in all of this. I will post this for reader input.
Phaed