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Compote of Pears
Pare and quarter eight nice pears, and put in a porcelain saucepan with water enough to cook; put on lid, and cook fruit until tender, then remove to a platter; make a syrup of a pound of sugar and a pint of pear-water; add juice of two lemons and the grated rind of one, and put in the pears; cook them for a few minutes in this syrup, then remove to the dish in which they are to be molded. Soak an ounce of gelatine for an hour or two in enough water to cover it, and stir it into the hot syrup; let boil up once and turn it over fruit through a strainer. The mold should be dipped in cold water before putting in fruit. When cold, turn jelly into a dish and serve with whipped cream around the base, or pour sweet cream over it in saucers.
A molded pear jelly built from the fruit's own poaching liquid. The only real pitfall is gelatine strength, since an ounce was sold as sheets of variable quality.
- Gelatine quantityOne ounce is about 28 g, or four standard 7 g envelopes of powdered gelatine — enough to firmly set roughly a quart of liquid. With only a pint of syrup plus lemon juice, that is a stiff, sliceable jelly; two envelopes give a softer set that still unmolds.
- SoakingThe one-to-two hour soak belongs to old leaf and shred gelatine. Modern powder blooms in cold water in 5 to 10 minutes; sheets need about 5 minutes and should be squeezed out before going into the hot syrup.
- Do not boil hard"Let boil up once" is as far as it should go. Prolonged boiling weakens gelatine's setting power, so bring the syrup just to a bubble after the gelatine dissolves and take it off.
- Porcelain saucepanThis means a nonreactive pan — enameled cast iron or stainless. The lemon juice and pear acid will pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminum or unlined copper.
- Pear-waterSimply the liquid the pears cooked in. Cook them in just enough water to cover so the liquid stays concentrated; if it has reduced below a pint, top it up.
- MeasuresA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; a pint is 2 cups. The syrup is deliberately heavy — it both glazes the fruit and carries the set.
- Choice of pearUse firm, slightly underripe Bosc or Anjou. Ripe Bartletts collapse into mush before they are "tender" in the sense meant here.
- Setting and unmoldingChill at least 4 to 6 hours, or overnight. The cold-water dip helps release the jelly; a few seconds in warm water against the outside of the mold, then invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldEight quartered pears in a 1 to 1.5 quart mold serves six to eight.
Compotes — fruit cooked whole or in pieces in sugar syrup — take their name from the French compote, by way of Old French composte, a stewed or "composed" dish, and by the nineteenth century the word covered everything from a plain bowl of stewed apples to elaborate molded jellies like this one. What marks this version as late-1870s American is the gelatine: packaged gelatine in leaf and shredded form was by then sold commercially, though of variable strength, and cookbooks of the period are full of molded jellies, charlottes and Bavarian creams that would earlier have required a cook to boil down calves' feet. Buckeye Cookery, first published in 1877 at Marysville, Ohio, with later editions issued from Minneapolis, was assembled from contributions by practical housekeepers, and its fruit chapter reflects a kitchen with a good orchard and no refrigeration to speak of — sugar syrup and a cold cellar were how you kept pears worth eating past the harvest.