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Pyramid of Pears
Pears sliced, sugared, with a little lemon or orange juice, or sherry, added, or pears which are so prepared and then crushed may be heaped in layers, alternating with whipped cream, and sprinkled with candied cherries or angelica.
An assembly dessert rather than a cooked one, so the whole thing rests on the fruit. The original gives no quantities at all; treat it as a method and scale to your dish.
- Choose the pear for textureBartlett, Comice or Anjou all work raw; the buttery, non-gritty flesh is the point. Underripe pears will not sweeten with sugar alone, so buy them several days ahead and let them soften until they yield at the neck.
- The lemon is not optionalThe acid does more than flavour -- Cut pear browns quickly, so juice added at once acts as an antioxidant as much as a seasoning. The original treats lemon, orange juice and sherry as alternatives, so this is a cook's preference rather than a requirement of the recipe.
- Sugar draws waterSliced sugared pears begin releasing juice quite quickly. Either macerate deliberately and drain off the syrup before layering, or sugar and build at once, or the pyramid will slump into a puddle.
- Working proportionsRoughly 4 ripe pears, 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar, the juice of half a lemon and 1 to 2 tablespoons sherry to 1 cup heavy cream whipped with a spoonful of sugar. That fills four to six glasses or one shallow serving bowl.
- Stabilise the creamPlain whipped cream can weep under fruit juice as it stands. Whip to firm peaks rather than soft, and if the dessert must wait, fold in a little mascarpone or creme fraiche to hold the layers.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a common confectioner's item, is now a specialist purchase found mainly online or in French and Italian shops. Chopped candied citron or crystallised ginger give a similar sweet bite; pistachios come closest to the green.
- Sherry choiceA dry fino disappears against sugared fruit. An amontillado, oloroso or cream sherry gives the nutty depth the recipe is reaching for.
- ServingBuild shortly before the table and keep it cold. The recipe asks only that the fruit and cream be 'heaped in layers'; individual glasses hold their shape better than a tall heap.
Layered raw fruit and whipped cream was the drawing-room answer to a dessert course when no oven work was wanted, and it belongs to the same family as the English trifle and the fruit fool without the cooked custard or the sponge. The pyramid shape matters: table arrangement of the sort often associated with the late Victorian and Edwardian period prized height, and sweets were piled up on a raised dish for effect. Candied cherries and angelica were a standard decorative pair on those tables, angelica supplying a green much used by confectioners, and their appearance here reads as a decorative convention as much as a flavour choice. Books of fruit recipes multiplied in the early twentieth century as commercial cold storage and rail shipping made pears and other soft fruit reliably available beyond their few local weeks, and a recipe like this one, which asks for no cooking and no measuring, was aimed squarely at the cook with good fruit and little time.