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Pears, Baked
Rub half a dozen large hard pears with a soft cloth. Put them on a buttered baking-tin into a slow oven, and let them bake gently for five or six hours. When tender they are done enough, and will be found excellent if eaten with sugar. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A bare-bones instruction for whole pears dried down slowly rather than poached, and the low temperature is the whole point.
- "Slow oven"Conventionally taken as somewhere around 250-300F; the book itself gives no temperature. At that sort of heat the fruit collapses gradually and the juices reduce to syrup inside the skin rather than bursting out.
- Five or six hours is not a typoHard cooking pears at a very low heat genuinely take that long. Hurrying them in a hotter oven is likely to split the skins and leave the flesh watery rather than dense and dark. Test with a skewer, which should meet no resistance at the core.
- Which pears"large hard pears" points to a stewing variety of the sort long known in England as warden pears, though the recipe names none. Bosc, or any underripe firm pear, works; a ripe Bartlett or Comice will break down to sauce long before the time is up.
- Left whole and unpeeledThe skin is the vessel here, which is why the recipe says only to rub the fruit with a cloth. Leave the stems on, stand them upright on the tin, and do not core them.
- The buttered tinButter alone will scorch over six hours. A splash of water in the tin, replenished if it dries, keeps the sugars that leak out from burning onto the metal.
- ServingThe recipe's own suggestion is simply that the pears be eaten with sugar; cream, or the reduced juices from the tin spooned back over, is a common modern addition. Serve warm rather than hot.
- Yield and costSix pears for three or four people, so one and a half to two each. The shilling is a period price and carries no modern meaning.
Baked whole pears belong to a long English tradition of cooking hard, gritty perry and stewing pears that are inedible raw. Varieties of this kind, generally traced back to the medieval "warden" pears, were valued precisely because they kept for months in a cool store and turned sweet, red-brown and fragrant under long slow heat. The method suits the kitchen this book was written for: a coal range holding residual warmth after the day's main cooking was ideal for something that wanted five hours of gentle heat and no attention. Cassell's notes the probable cost at a shilling and the yield at three or four people, the standard framing throughout the Dictionary, which was aimed at middle-class households running to a budget and a servant or two.