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Baked Pears-Stuffed or Meringued
Pare and core large pears; stuff with seeded dates, raisins, or chopped nuts, with some tart marmalade of other fruit, or shredded cocoanut; place close together in a dish or pan and bake slowly till tender, without sugar and only enough moisture to prevent burning. When done place in a heated glass dish and serve, cold, or pour over them a simple custard or melted marshmallows.
For the Meringued Pears bake the fruit with a little lemon peel or candied ginger in the centres and when tender place over them a meringue made with the whites of three eggs and half cup of sugar. Brown quickly and serve with rich milk.
A flexible, sugar-free base recipe with two finishes. The main thing the original leaves out is the fruit itself: this only works with pears firm enough to hold their shape through a long, slow bake.
- Choose the pearBosc or Anjou, ripe but still firm to the thumb, are the right choice; Bartlett collapses into sauce. Large fruit is specified because the cavity has to hold a stuffing.
- Coring a whole pearPare, then work from the blossom end with a melon baller or apple corer, leaving the stem end closed so the filling stays put. Stand them upright and close together so they brace one another.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature. A slow oven is usually taken today as somewhere around 300-325F; at that heat expect large pears to need roughly three-quarters of an hour to an hour, tested with a skewer at the thickest part of the shoulder.
- Only enough moistureA shallow film of water, cider or fruit juice in the pan is all the phrase asks for; the point is to stop scorching, not to poach. The dish is deliberately unsweetened, so any sweetness comes from the dates, raisins, marmalade or coconut in the cavity.
- Melted marshmallowsCommercial marshmallows were already a packaged grocery item by the early twentieth century, though the period's versions were not always gelatin-based in the modern way; melt them with a spoonful of cream over low heat or they scorch and string.
- The meringueThree whites to half a cup of sugar is a soft meringue, not a hard one. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar a spoonful at a time, beat to stiff and glossy, and seal it down to the edge of the dish so it does not weep.
- "Brown quickly"No heat is given. In modern terms that means a hot oven, around 425-450F for a few minutes, or a short spell under the broiler with the door watched. The meringue is set and lightly coloured, not dried out.
- "Rich milk"Period shorthand for unskimmed milk or thin cream; half-and-half is the nearest modern equivalent. The recipe says only to serve the meringued pears with it.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Reckoning one pear per person, six large pears will sit close together in a large baking dish and are about as much as a three-white meringue will cover.
Baked stuffed fruit belongs to a strand of early twentieth-century cookery that treated fruit as a dish in its own right rather than a sweetmeat, and this book's instruction to bake "without sugar" fits that pattern. Fruit-forward cookbooks of the period, some of them written for households influenced by the health-reform and domestic-science movements, argued that ripe fruit carried enough sweetness of its own and that dates, raisins and marmalade could do the rest. The two finishes show the range the format allowed: a custard or meringue for a company dessert, melted marshmallows for the sweeter American taste of the years when marshmallows were becoming a cheap packaged grocery. Pears suit the treatment because their flesh softens without disintegrating, the same quality behind the long slow poaching in wine or syrup long practised in European kitchens.