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Pears Stewed in Butter
Take half a dozen large baking pears, pare and core without breaking them, and fill the cavity in each with a clove crushed to powder, a little moist sugar, and a small lump of butter. Put them into a stewpan with the stalk ends upper-most, and pour over them three ounces of clarified butter; cover the saucepan closely, and let them stew gently until they are quite soft without being broken, then lift them out carefully, fill the hollows with red currant jelly, and arrange the pears on a dish, with the narrow parts meeting in the centre. Pile half a dozen macaroons which have been soaked in sherry, in the centre of the fruit, round which pour the syrup and serve. Time to stew the pears, about one hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A dish of whole pears cooked in nothing but butter, which means the pan and the heat do all the work. The points below cover the units, the fruit and the one thing that will ruin it.
- The hinge: heat low, lid tightThere is no water and no wine in the pan, only three ounces of butter, so the pears cook in their own steam. If the heat is anything above a bare simmer the sugar and butter will scorch before the fruit softens. A heavy pan with a well-fitting lid keeps it honest.
- "Baking pears"Victorian baking pears were hard, gritty cooking varieties such as Catillac, useless raw and needing long cooking. Use firm Bosc or underripe Anjou. Ripe Bartlett or Comice will collapse well inside the hour, and the recipe depends on the pears holding their shape.
- Three ounces of clarified butterAbout six tablespoons, which means starting with roughly seven to eight tablespoons of ordinary butter, melted and the milk solids skimmed and discarded. Clarified matters here: milk solids in a pan held at heat for an hour will brown and can turn bitter.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown sugar. A rounded teaspoon in each cavity is enough; the currant jelly added later brings more sweetness.
- A clove crushed to powderOne whole clove ground per pear, not a spoonful of ground cloves. Pre-ground clove from a jar has faded, so a fresh clove crushed in a mortar is worth the minute.
- Coring without breakingPeel, leave the stalk on, and drive an apple corer up from the blossom end so the cavity stops short of the top. That keeps a closed pocket for the sugar and butter and lets the pears stand stalk upward as directed.
- TimingAn hour is right for genuinely hard fruit. Start testing at 35 to 40 minutes with a skewer through the shoulder; the pear should give with no resistance while still standing up.
- MacaroonsCrisp almond macaroons in the Victorian sense, closest now to Italian amaretti, not soft coconut macaroons and not French macarons. Soak them only briefly in sherry or they will not hold their shape in the pile.
- The syrupWhat is left in the pan is buttery pear juice rather than a true syrup. Stir a spoonful of the currant jelly into it over low heat to thicken and gloss it before pouring round the dish.
- YieldFive or six as written, served warm. Cream or a thin custard is not in the original but sits well with it.
The recipe is really a lesson in cooking hard fruit without water: butter, a closed pan and an hour of gentle heat. That mattered in a period when most English pears sold for cooking were dense, tannic keeping varieties, picked in autumn and stored in a cool room for months, edible only after long stewing or baking; the soft dessert pear that needs no cooking at all was a comparatively expensive luxury. Red currant jelly, then a standing item in any well-run larder, does double duty as sweetener and glaze, and the sherry-soaked macaroons in the centre are the sort of built-up centrepiece Victorian dinner tables favoured, very likely for a second-course sweet. The costing of 1s. 2d., exclusive of the sherry, is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households keeping accounts as carefully as recipes.