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Pear Dainty
I can preserved pears 5 ozs. (5 heaping tablespoonfuls) sugar 2 pints (4 cups) milk 3 ozs. (3 heaping tablespoonfuls) cornstarch 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful rose extract stones and chop the kernels, add them to the prune pulp, and allow to cool a little.
Clean the currants and soak them in the wine.
Mix them with the cornstarch and add them to the prune mixture, with the yolks of eggs and the whites stiffly beaten. Pour into a buttered earthenware dish, dredge with sugar, and bake for half an hour in a fairly hot oven. Serve hot.
This page is a printing accident. The ingredient list belongs to a pear pudding; the method that follows belongs to a prune pudding from elsewhere in the pudding section, and the two have been run together with the end of the pear instructions lost. Nothing here can be followed from top to bottom.
- The two halves do not matchThe list calls for canned pears, milk, cornstarch, eggs, sugar and rose extract. The method calls for prune pulp, currants, wine and chopped stone kernels, and never mentions pears, milk or rose extract at all. There is no way to reconcile them; the missing text is the whole point of the recipe.
- The chopped kernelsThe stray method directs the cook to crack the prune or plum stones and chop the kernels into the pulp. Those kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when crushed and moistened. It was a common nineteenth-century almond-flavour substitute and is not a practice to revive, in any quantity.
- Weights given as spoonfulsThe book glosses 5 oz of sugar as "5 heaping tablespoonfuls" and 3 oz of cornstarch as "3 heaping tablespoonfuls." These are rough equivalences at best: 5 oz of sugar is about three-quarters of a cup, and 3 oz of cornstarch about two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup, and a heaping spoonful is not a fixed measure. Treat the ounce weights as the reliable figures and the spoon counts as an approximation.
- "A fairly hot oven"Period oven terms were not standardised, but "fairly hot" is generally read as somewhere in the region of 375-425F. It is given for reference only, since the instructions it belongs to are not the ones printed above it.
- Rose extractRose flavouring was a standard sweet-pudding note into the early twentieth century and is still sold as rose water and as the far stronger rose extract. They are not interchangeable by volume; extract is used in drops where rose water is used in spoonfuls.
- What to do insteadIf you want a rose-scented cornstarch custard baked over preserved pears, work from a current blancmange or baked-custard recipe with reliable proportions and temperatures. This page does not contain enough of one to use.
"Dainty" was a common title for a light moulded or baked sweet built on cornstarch, milk and eggs, thickened rather than pastry-bound, and the pear version relied on tinned fruit, which was cheap and widely available by the 1900s. Rose flavouring, which reads as unusual now, was an ordinary sweet-kitchen perfume inherited from older English confectionery, and it gave way to vanilla in domestic use over the following few decades.