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Bordure de Poires à la Reine
(Border of Fears.) Ingredients.
Two pounds of small Stewing Pears.
One pound of loaf Sugar.
One piece of whole Cinnamon.
A piece of Genoese Cake or three Sponge Cakes.
Two whole Eggs and one Yolk.
Two ounces of castor Sugar.
Rind of half a Lemon.
A few drops of Cochineal.
A gill and a half of Milk.
Peel and core the pears; put them in a stewpan with one quart of water, the loaf sugar, cinnamon, and cochineal; let this boil up, skim it, and allow it to simmer until the pears are tender. This will take about half an hour. Take out the fruit, reduce the syrup to the proper consistency, put the pears in the syrup again, and keep warm.
Butter a border-mould with clarified butter; line the bottom with a piece of buttered paper.
Beat up the eggs in a basin; add the castor sugar, milk, lemon rind (finely chopped), and a few drops of cochineal to give the custard a pink colour.
Cut the cake in slices, place it in the mould, fill it up with the custard, stand the mould in a baking tin half filled with boiling water, cover with buttered paper, and bake in the oven for forty minutes. Turn it out on to a hot dish; remove the paper; arrange the pears in a row on the border; strain the syrup, pour it over the pears, and serve.
A baked bread-and-butter-style custard set in a ring mould, unmoulded and filled with poached pears. The printed title "Border of Fears" is a compositor's slip for Pears. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must set gently in its water bath, and the syrup must be reduced far enough to glaze rather than flood the dish.
- Gill and a halfA gill is a quarter of a pint in British measure, so a gill and a half is 7½ fl oz, near enough a cup. With two whole eggs and a yolk this gives a soft custard, correct for a mould that is supported by cake.
- Loaf sugarCone or block sugar, broken up for use; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement. Castor sugar is superfine sugar, used here because it dissolves in the cold custard without grittiness.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a custard in a bain-marie, a moderate oven of around 325F is a safe modern equivalent; the forty minutes will depend on the size of the mould, and too hot an oven risks curdling the edges before the centre sets. Test by inserting a knife an inch from the centre ring.
- CochinealA red colouring made from dried scale insects, sold in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens as a liquid. Carmine or any red food colouring gives the same pale pink; it is entirely cosmetic and can be left out of both the pears and the custard.
- Genoese cakeGénoise, the whole-egg sponge baked in a sheet or shallow tin. Slightly dry cake absorbs the custard better than fresh; sponge fingers or trimmed pound cake work.
- The pearsSmall stewing pears means hard cooking varieties, which keep their shape through half an hour of simmering. Modern dessert pears such as Bartlett will collapse well before that; use firm, underripe fruit and start checking at fifteen minutes.
- Reducing the syrup"Proper consistency" here means a light syrup that coats the back of a spoon, which will mean boiling the quart down by a good deal. Reduce it with the pears out of the pan, as directed, then return them so they do not overcook while it thickens.
- UnmouldingLet the custard stand five to ten minutes out of the water bath before turning out, so it firms enough to hold the ring shape. Buttered paper on the base, as directed, is worth doing; a disc of parchment does the same job.
- YieldProbably about six servings. It is at its best warm, which is why the recipe calls for a hot dish and warm pears.
The bordure was a standard shape in nineteenth-century professional pastry work: anything baked or moulded in a ring, then turned out and its hollow centre filled with fruit, cream or a compote. Dishes labelled à la reine generally signal a rich or whitened preparation in classical French kitchen vocabulary, though by the late Victorian period the tag was applied loosely to almost any dish a cook wished to dignify. The pink tint from cochineal is characteristic of the period, when confectioners coloured blancmanges, creams and moulded sweets freely; cochineal was one of the few colourings then considered wholesome, in contrast to the lead and copper compounds that the mid-century food-adulteration scandals had exposed.