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Pears Uncooked
A Breakfast or Supper Dish To vary the serving of pears au naturel, pare, core, and slice mellow, well-flavoured fruit, using a silver knife. Sprinkle the slices with sugar; chill well, then serve with cream and brown bread and butter: a substantial and dainty meal. 1
Barely a recipe, and entirely dependent on the fruit: nothing here will improve an underripe pear. Choose fruit that yields to gentle pressure at the neck and smells like a pear.
- "Mellow" pearsMeans fully ripe and soft-fleshed, not mealy. Bartlett and Doyenne du Comice (usually sold simply as Comice) work well; firmer winter pears such as Bosc are generally better poached. Ripen at room temperature and refrigerate only once ready.
- The silver knifeThis is the one instruction with a reason behind it. Carbon-steel blades of the period reacted with fruit acids and left grey streaks on the cut flesh and a metallic taste. Modern stainless steel does the same job; silver is no longer necessary.
- Au naturelSimply fruit served raw and unsauced. The phrase is common in Victorian and Edwardian fruit cookery, distinguishing uncooked fruit from compotes and preserves.
- SugarNo quantity is given because the fruit decides it. Start with a teaspoon of caster or superfine sugar per pear, tossed through the slices; it draws out juice as the fruit chills and makes a light syrup.
- ChillingThe recipe says to chill well. Half an hour will dissolve the sugar, but longer may be wanted for the fruit to be properly cold; against that, the slices soften and brown at the edges, so cut them not much more than an hour before serving.
- CreamPeriod "cream" for pouring was roughly what we call single or light cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat. Heavy cream is thicker than intended, though it can be thinned with milk.
- Brown bread and butterWholemeal or a light rye, cut thin and buttered generously — the fat and salt are doing the real work against the sweet fruit. Toasting is not intended.
- YieldOne large pear per person for breakfast, with two or three slices of bread and butter each.
Fruit-and-cream dishes like this one belong to a specific moment in Anglo-American eating, when iceboxes were spreading through middle-class kitchens and raw fruit was shedding its old reputation as a cause of summer illness. A recurring nineteenth-century anxiety held that fruit was safest cooked; by the time collections of "fruit recipes" were being published, chilled raw fruit with sugar and cream had become a respectable breakfast in its own right. The instruction to use a silver knife is the older habit surviving inside the newer dish \-\- a carryover from the days of carbon-steel blades, when fruit knives, fruit forks and fruit services were sold in silver or silver plate precisely because ordinary cutlery blackened anything acidic. The pairing with brown bread and butter, rather than cake or biscuits, marks this as a plain family meal rather than a dessert course.