Baked Pears
Bake washed, unpeeled pears in pan with only a tea-spoon or two of water; sprinkle with the sugar, and serve with their own syrup.
A one-line recipe that assumes a hard, dense cooking pear and a wood range with residual heat. A few specifics make it work in a modern oven.
- Oven temperatureBuckeye Cookery gives none. Baked whole fruit does best at 350F, covered for the first half so the pears steam rather than shrivel.
- Choose the right pearThe method suits firm cooking varieties such as Bosc, Kieffer or Seckel, which hold their shape through long baking. A ripe Bartlett or Comice will break down to sauce much faster.
- The water is not a mistakeA teaspoon or two seems absurd, but the point is to keep the pan from scorching before the fruit releases its own juice. That juice, reduced with the sugar, is the "own syrup" of the last line. Add more water and you get a thin, weak liquid instead.
- Cover the panA deep dish with a lid or foil traps steam and keeps the skins from drying to leather. Uncover for the last fifteen minutes to let the syrup thicken and the tops colour.
- Sugar quantityUnspecified, as was normal. Roughly a tablespoon per pear suits a tart cooking variety; taste the pears raw and use less if they are already sweet.
- TimingWhole unpeeled cooking pears need 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on size and hardness. They are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the core.
- Skins on, stems onLeaving them unpeeled is deliberate: the skin holds the fruit together and contributes colour and pectin to the syrup. Wash well, and leave the stems as handles.
- YieldCount one to two pears per person. Good warm with cream, or cold the next day, when the syrup may thicken as it cools.
Baked fruit belongs to the economy of a wood-fired range: the oven held usable heat long after the bread came out, and a pan of hard pears could sit in it unattended. Nineteenth-century American orchards were full of varieties bred for keeping and cooking rather than eating out of hand, including the Kieffer, a tough, gritty pear widely planted in the decades around this book's publication and generally reckoned poor eating raw. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was published in 1877, edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox, grew out of an earlier Ohio church-fundraising collection, and was reissued many times. Its fruit entries are characteristically terse, assuming a cook who already knows how her own oven behaves. The instruction to serve the fruit in "their own syrup" is in keeping with the period's fruit cookery.