What is a goose pear?

A goose pear, e li 鵝梨, is a Chinese pear with thin skin and plenty of juice. An eleventh-century herbal says its taste falls a little short of the best pears, but its fragrance is greater. That fragrance is why it went into incense: the best-known recipe steams agarwood in goose-pear juice.

What the herbals say

Su Song’s illustrated herbal of 1061 names the two pears that doctors used, the milk pear and the goose pear. Li Shizhen quotes it in his Bencao gangmu, finished in 1578:

Milk pears come from Xuancheng. Their skin is thick and their flesh firm, and the taste lingers. Goose pears grow in the prefectures north and south of the Yellow River. Their skin is thin and they are full of juice. The taste falls a little short, but the fragrance is greater.

Li Shizhen adds that the goose pear is the same as the mianli 綿梨, the “silk-floss pear”. Neither of them says where the name “goose” comes from.

Li Shizhen puts it among the three best pears, with the milk pear, which he says is the snow pear, and the xiaoli 消梨, which he calls the “fragrant-water pear”. Many others, such as the green-skin, the early-grain and the half-catty pears, he finds coarse and astringent, fit only for steaming, boiling or drying into strips.

Another herbal, Kou Zongshi’s of 1116, describes a different fruit as “yellow like a goose pear”. So a ripe goose pear was yellow.

The tree

Li Shizhen describes the pear tree as two or three zhang tall, roughly twenty or thirty feet, with pointed, glossy, finely toothed leaves. In the second lunar month it opens white flowers “like snow”. He quotes an old saying: “Wind at Shangsi, worms in the pears; no moon at mid-autumn, no pearls in the mussels.” Shangsi, the third day of the third month, came just after the flowers. If that day was still, the fruit would set well.

Pears do not come true from seed. Li Shizhen repeats a sixth-century farming manual: of the ten or so seeds in a pear, only one or two grow into pear trees, and the rest grow into wild du 杜 pears. Good pears were grafted onto wild pear or mulberry stock, which also made them bear sooner.

Where the good pears grew

“Good pears mostly grow in the north,” Li Shizhen writes. “In the south, only those of Xuancheng are better.” He lists the places older writers praised, among them Zhending, Juye, Suiyang, Linzi, Hongnong, the capital region of Chang’an, Ye and Luoyang, and gathers what they said:

Sima Qian wrote that a man with a thousand pear trees north of the Huai and along the Yellow River was the equal of a marquis with a thousand households.
An edict of Emperor Wen of Wei, who reigned from 220 to 226, praised the imperial pears of Zhending: “as big as a fist, sweet as honey, crisp as water caltrop”.
An early record of the Three Qin region describes a pear so full of juice that it burst if it fell, so it had to be caught in a bag. Emperor Wu of Han planted them in his park.

The goose pear belongs to the same northern pear country. Su Song places it on both banks of the Yellow River, and in Kaifeng the trays in the wine shops sold goose pears “from Hebei”, north of the river.

Sold in the streets of Kaifeng

Meng Yuanlao’s memoir of Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, mentions goose pears more than once. In the wine shops, sellers came round with small trays of dried fruit: ginkgo nuts and chestnuts roasted on the spot, goose pears from Hebei, pear strips, dried pears. In the sixth month, stalls at street corners and by the bridges sold “watery goose pears” under blue cloth umbrellas, along with white peaches, apricots and ice.

Why it went into incense

For its fragrance. Hong Chu’s Song-dynasty incense register records the bed-curtain incense of the Southern Tang ruler: agarwood steamed in goose-pear juice. Chen’s Incense Register, finished by 1322, gives two versions that use the pears. In one, a liang of agarwood (about forty grams) is steamed three times with the juice of ten goose pears in a silver vessel until the juice has gone. In the other, the pears are hollowed out and filled with powdered agarwood and sandalwood, then steamed.

The same register uses the pear twice more:

The Southern Tang ruler’s simmered agarwood. For each liang of agarwood, the juice of ten goose pears, steamed several times in a silver or stone vessel. Or shave the agarwood into slivers about half a cun long, a centimetre and a half, sharpen one end, push them all into a pear and steam it for as long as it takes to drink a cup. When the pear is cooked, take the slivers out.
Small dragon-saliva incense. One of its versions is only agarwood and a little borneol, ground fine and pressed into cakes with goose-pear juice, then burned.

In each recipe the pear carries the scent. Its juice is steamed into the wood or binds the powder, and its fragrance goes with it.

Goose-Pear Canopy: the incense for inside the bed curtains tells the whole story of the bed-curtain incense, with Huang Tingjian’s poems about it.

Is a goose pear an Asian pear?

Probably a close relative, though no one can say which pear it was. The pears of north China today, such as the Ya pear 鴨梨 of Hebei, are what botanists call Chinese white pears, Pyrus × bretschneideri. They are cousins of the round nashi pears sold in the West as “Asian pears”, and like them they are crisp and juicy rather than soft and buttery like a European pear.

The Ya pear’s name means “duck pear”, from the small knob by its stalk that looks like a duck’s head. It is tempting to link the duck to the goose, but no old text does, and we would not claim it.

In our beads

Goose pear is one of the four materials in Goose-Pear Canopy, with an agarwood accord, sandalwood and Pu’er tea leaves. It gives the crisp opening. In our beads it is powdered and blended with the rest; nothing is steamed in pear juice. The register of materials lists what is in each of our four bracelets.

See the entry: Goose-Pear Canopy · 鵝梨帳中香

Sources

Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu 本草綱目, fruits, part 2 (梨, quoting Su Song’s Bencao tujing 本草圖經, Jia Sixie, Sima Qian, Emperor Wen of Wei and the Sanqin ji 三秦記; 庵羅果, quoting Kou Zongshi’s Bencao yanyi 本草衍義).
Meng Yuanlao, Dongjing menghua lu 東京夢華錄, volume 2 (飲食果子) and volume 8 (是月巷陌雜賣).
Chen Jing, Chenshi xiangpu 陳氏香譜, volume 2 (江南李主帳中香 and its variants; 江南李王煎沉; 小龍涎香).