Northeastern Frozen Pears 东北冻梨

Where it comes from

The Heilongjiang Meteorological Bureau (黑龙江省气象局) traces the northeastern habit of eating frozen fruit back more than a thousand years, to the Khitan (契丹) of the Liao dynasty. In later times, before transport was easy, the fruit Heilongjiang households could get was little more than apples, pears, persimmons and hawthorns brought a long way from Hebei and Shandong, plus local haws and crabapples, and without modern cold storage people froze it to keep it. The pear is the classic frozen fruit, and the bureau names Huagai (花盖梨), Qiuzi (秋子梨) and white pears among many varieties, saying almost any pear can be frozen this way.

How it is made

Ren Aihua (任爱华), a pear researcher at the horticulture branch of the Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told Science and Technology Daily (科技日报) that picked pears are first stored indoors at room temperature for a while so the flesh softens, and then frozen in the natural cold of the northeast. At very low temperatures the water in the cells forms ice crystals that pierce the cell membranes, sugars and acids leak out, and the pear's flavour becomes more intense.

The meteorological bureau stresses that this is not chilling in a fridge: the pear must freeze harder than a brick, with the winter at minus 20 to minus 30 degrees Celsius acting as a natural freezer. Frozen pears turn black, and the bureau compares them to lumps of charcoal.

Thawing is a step of its own, called huan dongli (缓冻梨). A few pears go into a basin of water deep enough to cover them. Ice first forms around the fruit and joins them in a single shell; as the shell melts, the pears turn so soft that a light press leaves a deep dent.

How it is eaten

The bureau advises a small first bite, which releases a burst of ice-cold juice; the juice is then sucked out, and the flesh left behind is fine and springy, white inside the black skin. The bureau also describes a more impatient way: biting hard into a pear only half thawed, when the flesh and frozen juice crackle between the teeth. Science and Technology Daily describes lifting the stalk of a pear thawed in water to pull out the core, which has come away from the flesh, and drawing up the sweet-sour, partly frozen flesh through a straw.

Which pears

Not every pear freezes well. Science and Technology Daily reports that scientists found cold-hardy, late-ripening pears that continue to ripen after picking suit freezing best, and that after more than twenty years of selection and trials a pear bred for the purpose by researchers at the academy's horticulture branch, Dongmi pear (冬蜜梨), was approved and released. Ren describes it as thin-skinned, thick-fleshed, small-cored and sweet-sour. It is still hanging on the tree in late September and early October, after other pears have been picked, and ripens when winter has all but arrived.