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Pears, Stewed
Pare, core, and halve eight or ten good-sized pears, leaving the stalks or not, according to taste; put them into a tinned saucepan, with six ounces of loaf sugar, six cloves, six whole allspice, three-quarters of a pint of water, and a glassful of port, and let them boil as gently as possible until they are quite soft without being broken. Lift them out, put them on a glass dish, and when the syrup is cold strain it over them. A little Devonshire cream, or, failing this, a little custard, is a great improvement to this dish. Time to stew the pears, from two hours and a half to three hours. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A long, slow poach in spiced port syrup. The only real technique here is heat control: the liquid should barely move for the whole cooking time, or the fruit collapses.
- Pears to useFirm, slightly underripe fruit is essential — Bosc, Conference or any hard cooking pear. Ripe supermarket Bartlett or Comice will disintegrate long before the two and a half hours the recipe allows.
- On the timingTwo and a half to three hours assumes hard, often barely ripe autumn fruit at a bare shiver. Firm modern pears usually take 30–50 minutes; check with a skewer from 25 minutes and stop when they yield with slight resistance.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a cone or block and broken up as needed. Six ounces is about 170 g, nearer seven-eighths of a US cup of granulated sugar.
- Liquid measuresThree-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, roughly 1¾ US cups. A "glassful" of port means a wine glass of the period, about 2 to 2½ fl oz — a quarter cup is a fair reading.
- Tinned saucepanSpecified because bare copper or iron reacts with the fruit acid and the wine, dulling the colour and giving a metallic edge. Any stainless steel or enamelled pan does the job now.
- Keep it submergedThe pears should sit in a single layer and stay under the syrup; a scrap of parchment laid on the surface keeps the exposed shoulders from going pale and grainy.
- Reducing the syrupLift the fruit out and boil the strained liquid down to a light syrup before cooling it — the recipe as written leaves it thin. Cool it fully before pouring over, as the instruction says, so the pears do not go on softening.
- Devonshire creamClotted cream, thick and just short of set. Any thick unsweetened cream serves, and the custard alternative would have been a pouring crème anglaise rather than anything set.
- YieldFive or six servings, as given. "Probable cost, 1s. 4d." is the book's household budgeting note, not an instruction.
Stewed pears in wine belong to a long European line of hard cooking fruit made edible by hours of gentle heat — varieties like the Warden pear were grown in England specifically because they were inedible raw and excellent stewed, and "warden pies" turn up in English writing well before the Victorian period. The dish is thrift, using late-season fruit that would otherwise sit in the store, sweetened with sugar and coloured with a little port from the sideboard. The port does as much for the look as the flavour, tinting the flesh in a way that plain sugar syrup cannot manage. The suggestion of Devonshire cream, with custard as the fallback, is a neat piece of period class-marking — clotted cream was a regional luxury outside the West Country, custard the thing any kitchen could produce.