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Pear Tart
If mellow pears are used they will not require to be stewed before the pastry is put over them, but if the ordinary baking pears are made use of they must be prepared as follows. Take six or eight large pears, peel them thinly, core and quarter them, and put them into a stewpan with a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, two cloves, a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and a quarter of a pint of water. Let them simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour, then turn them into the dish prepared for them. When the fruit is cold, moisten the edge of the dish and line it with pastry, wet the band, put the cover on, press it down all round with the finger and thumb, trim the edge, and mark it with the back of a knife. Ornament the top by placing on it leaves or flowers stamped out with the pastry-cutter. Bake in a good oven. About ten minutes before the tart is done enough, draw it out, sprinkle over it white of egg mixed with a little cold water, sift powdered sugar thickly over it, and put it back in the oven to finish baking. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A covered fruit pie built in a deep rimmed dish rather than a tin, with a pre-cooked filling. The one rule that governs the result is in the middle of the text: the fruit must be completely cold before the pastry goes on.
- Cold fruit, alwaysWarm filling melts the fat in the pastry before it reaches the oven, producing a heavy, sodden lid. Stew the pears a day ahead if convenient and chill them in the dish they will be baked in.
- Which pears"Mellow" means ripe dessert pears, soft enough to eat out of hand; those go in raw. "Baking pears" were hard cooking varieties, now rare outside old orchards. Firm, slightly underripe Conference or Bosc behave much the same and benefit from the pre-stewing.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is soft light brown sugar, not granulated. A quarter of a pound is 4 oz, about half a cup packed.
- The liquid measureA quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. The pears should stew in a shallow pool, not swim.
- The pastry bandAn old-style pie dish has a broad rim. You wet it, press on a strip of pastry cut to fit, wet that strip, then lay the lid over and seal down onto it. The double thickness stops the crust sliding into the dish as the filling settles.
- "A good oven"A brisk heat, in modern terms somewhere around 400F (200C), though Victorian oven descriptions cannot be converted exactly. It wants to be hot enough to set and lift the pastry quickly.
- The glazeEgg white beaten with a little cold water, then a thick sifting of icing or caster sugar, ten minutes from the end. It sets into a pale crackled crust rather than the brown gloss a whole-egg wash gives. Watch it, as the sugar will scorch if the oven is fierce.
- Timing and yieldThree-quarters of an hour is right for a deep dish; check that the underside of the lid is cooked through and not pale and damp. Serves five or six, with cream or a custard.
- Cost1s. 2d. is the probable cost for the dish in pre-decimal currency, the sort of figure that let a household weigh one pudding against another. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
This belongs to the Victorian tradition of the deep covered fruit pie baked in an earthenware dish, which is why the instructions concern a rim and a band of pastry rather than a lined tin. The distinction it draws between "mellow" and "baking" pears mattered a great deal more then than now: a number of old English pear varieties were hard and astringent, barely edible raw and palatable only after long slow stewing with sugar and spice, and this recipe uses cloves and lemon-juice to that end. The white-of-egg-and-sugar finish, applied near the end of baking, is a device found elsewhere in the period's household manuals, giving a frosted top without the labour of icing. The costing and the "sufficient for five or six persons" line are characteristic of a book meant to help a mistress or cook plan and budget a table rather than simply follow a dish.