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Pears, Meringue Of
Pare, core, and halve a dozen pears, and stew them in syrup until they are sufficiently tender to be pierced easily with a needle; put them into a deep tart-dish which they will almost fill, and boil the syrup quickly until it is so much reduced that, when poured over the pears, it will only half cover them. Whisk the whites of four eggs to a solid froth. Stir into them four table-spoonfuls of powdered and sifted sugar, and spread the mixture evenly and smoothly over the fruit; put it at once into a moderate oven, and bake until the crust is lightly coloured and crisp even in the middle. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or six persons.
A Victorian meringue-topped baked pear dish that assumes you already know how to make a poaching syrup. The critical variable is oven heat: half an hour of "moderate" will brown a thin meringue well past "lightly coloured".
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read today as around 350F (175C). For a meringue that is crisp through to the middle after 30 minutes without scorching, 300-325F (150-160C) is the more reliable reading of the instruction, and the recipe's own test — crisp even at the centre — is what to judge by rather than the clock.
- The syrup is unspecifiedNo quantities are given, and the amount genuinely cannot be reconstructed from the text. A light poaching syrup of roughly one part sugar to two parts water, enough to cover the fruit, is one common modern approach; the recipe's real instruction is the reduction step afterwards.
- Reduce, then pourThe hinge of the dish. If the syrup only half covers the pears, the meringue sits on fruit rather than liquid and stays dry underneath. Too much liquid and the underside of the meringue weeps and slumps.
- Powdered and sifted sugarThis is caster sugar, not modern confectioners'/icing sugar, which contains cornstarch. Four tablespoons to four whites is a lean meringue by current standards — well under the usual 2 oz of sugar per white — so it will be soft and light rather than marshmallowy.
- Tart-dishA deep pie dish or shallow baking dish, glass or earthenware. The pears should almost fill it, as stated; a wide dish leaves too much surface for the meringue to bridge.
- Pear choice and the needle testFirm cooking pears such as Bosc or an underripe Conference hold their shape through stewing; ripe Bartlett/Williams will collapse. A needle or thin skewer should slide in with no resistance.
- YieldA dozen pears halved gives twenty-four pieces, and the original claims four to six servings, which is generous by modern appetites. Eight portions is more realistic.
- Probable costOne shilling, a late-Victorian retail price of no use today except as a reminder that this was written for a household costing out every dish.
This belongs to a large family of late nineteenth-century puddings in which stewed fruit is capped with whisked egg white — queen of puddings, apple snow, and the various "meringues" of apple, gooseberry and rhubarb that fill English cookery books of the 1870s onward. It is tempting to connect the technique's spread with the availability of cheap refined sugar and, just as importantly, with reliable closed ranges: an unvented brick oven with an unsteady fire will not hold a meringue at a low even heat for half an hour. Baked meringue toppings are generally traced to French pâtisserie practice of the eighteenth century, but their appearance in a domestic dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households, priced by the shilling, marks the point at which a confectioner's flourish had become an economical way to use up whites left from a custard and to make a dozen stewed pears look like a dessert.