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PEARS, BAKED (another way)
Pare very smoothly and take out the cores of a dozen large baking pears. Cut them into halves, and put the pears side by side into a well-brightened block-tin saucepan with a closely-fitting cover. Pour over them as much cold water as will cover them, add the thin rind of a small lemon, a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, an inch of stick cinnamon, and a few grains of allspice. Put on the cover, place the dish in a gentle oven, and let it remain there until the pears are tender. A little white wine may be added, if liked. If a saucepan such as is described is used, no cochineal will be required for the syrup. Time to bake, six hours. Probable cost, 1s. 8d to 2s. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A long, slow oven-poach of hard cooking pears. Everything depends on the pears being the right sort and the oven being genuinely low.
- Use true baking pearsThis wants a hard, tannic cooking variety that holds its shape for hours — Bosc, Concorde or an old stewing pear such as Catillac if you can find one. Ripe Bartlett or Comice will collapse into sauce long before the six hours are up.
- "A gentle oven"Roughly 275-300F on a modern dial, though the book gives no temperature. Aim for a bare tremble in the liquid rather than a brisk simmer.
- The six hours are not paddingProlonged low heat is what turns the flesh deep rose-red and gives it a dense, almost translucent texture. Cut the time to an hour and you get pale poached pears, which is a different dish.
- The tin saucepan and the cochineal"block tin" is solid, unalloyed tin rather than a tin lining over another metal, and a "well-brightened" one has been scoured bright; the remark about needing no cochineal suggests the bright pan was thought to help the reddening. In practice the colour comes from the pears' own tannins and pigments over long cooking. Any lidded ovenproof pot — enamelled cast iron, a covered casserole — will do, though a bare aluminium or cast-iron pan may dull the colour.
- Sugar is missingThe text refers to a syrup but never says to sweeten. Cassell assumes you will; add sugar to taste to the water at the start, roughly 4-6 oz for a dozen pears, and expect the liquid to thicken only slightly. It can be reduced on the hob afterwards.
- Aromatics"An inch of stick cinnamon" is a piece of a whole quill; "a few grains of allspice" means whole berries, four or five, not ground. Pare the lemon rind thin enough to leave the white pith behind.
- The lid mattersSix hours uncovered will boil the pan dry. If the lid is loose, seal it with foil, and check the level once or twice — the fruit should stay submerged.
- Cost and yield1s. 8d. to 2s. is Victorian shillings and pence, of no use now except as a rough indication of outlay. It serves eight to ten, warm or cold, with cream.
Hard cooking pears — warden pears, in the older English term — were a winter staple long before this book, valued precisely because they were too stony to eat raw and would keep for months in a loft. The slow oven treatment is medieval in outline: fruit, water, spice and a long dwindling heat, producing the deep claret colour for which stewed wardens were known. Cochineal was in use as a kitchen colourant by the time Cassell's was compiled, and the recipe's remark that a bright tin pan makes cochineal unnecessary is best read as period kitchen lore rather than chemistry, since the red develops from the pears themselves during the long bake. The optional white wine and the lemon are the Victorian gentrification of a very old, very plain method of making a hard fruit worth eating.