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Pear Croquettes
6 halves canned pears, 1/2 cup rice, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 cups milk, 1 lemon, 1 egg, lady fingers and angelica. Put milk and sugar in saucepan, bring to boil, and then add rice and grated rind of 1 lemon. Stir this over fire until rice is tender and milk absorbed, then turn it on to plate, and put aside to cool. Stand pears on hair sieve until syrup has drained away, then stuff hollow side with boiled rice, shaping it to a dome, so that they look like whole pears. Beat egg on plate, crush lady fingers, and rub them through wire sieve. Dip stuffed pears in egg, and toss in lady finger crumbs. Have ready pan of hot Crisco, fry croquettes in it until a golden brown. Take them up, and drain on paper. Insert small piece of angelica in end of each to represent pear-stalk. Dish up and serve hot.
A dessert croquette dressed up to look like a whole pear, from a book written to sell shortening. It is straightforward, but the frying and the drying of the pears decide whether it holds together.
- Drain the pears hardThis is the hinge. Canned pear halves carry a great deal of syrup, and any left behind will steam inside the coating and split it. Drain cut side down on a rack or sieve for at least half an hour, then blot the hollow dry before filling.
- Fat and temperatureCrisco was the sponsor's product and any neutral frying fat works. The original gives no temperature: use 350-365F, deep enough to float the croquettes. Hotter and the ladyfinger crumbs, which are sweet, will scorch before the filling warms through.
- The riceShort or medium grain, not long grain — you want it sticky enough to mound. Half a cup of raw rice to two cups of milk cooked down to dryness takes 25-35 minutes over low heat with regular stirring, and it must be cooled completely and firm before shaping.
- Ladyfinger crumbsStale, oven-dried ladyfingers crush and sieve cleanly; fresh soft ones smear. Dry them at 250F for 15 minutes first. One beaten egg is enough for six halves if you brush rather than dunk.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a standard confectioner's green garnish, is now a specialty item. Buy it candied; do not substitute foraged stems, since angelica is easily confused with poisonous relatives. Candied citron peel or a short cinnamon stick gives the same visual effect.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; such sieves are often said to have been preferred because metal could taint or discolour delicate mixtures. Any fine-mesh strainer or a cooling rack does the job here.
- Yield and servingSix croquettes, so three modest servings or six as part of a larger dessert course. Serve hot, as directed — the rice firms and goes chalky as it cools. A thin custard or the reserved pear syrup reduced makes a reasonable sauce.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s as promotional literature for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911; that is why the frying fat is named by brand in the middle of an otherwise unbranded recipe. The dish itself belongs to the long Edwardian vogue for croquettes, in which almost anything — chicken, rice, sweetbreads, fruit — was bound, breaded and deep-fried, and to the parallel taste for food shaped to imitate something else. Rebuilding drained pear halves into whole pears with a rice pudding filling and a stalk of candied angelica is squarely in that tradition, and the angelica itself was then a common green garnish on trifles and cakes, sold candied by grocers and confectioners in a way it no longer generally is.