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Baked Pears
6 medium-sized pears 1/2 cup brown sugar Butter Select firm and ripe pears, without blemish. Cut in halves lengthwise. Remove the core, and sprinkle with brown sugar, using a tablespoon for each pear. Dot each half with two or three small bits of butter. Bake until tender and nicely browned in a moderate oven. Serve with whipped cream.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know your oven and your fruit. Two things need pinning down: the temperature and the fact that the pears must be underripe rather than ready to eat.
- Moderate ovenSet it to 350F. At that heat halved pears take roughly 30 to 45 minutes depending on variety and ripeness; test with a knife tip at the thickest part of the shoulder.
- Choose the fruit for baking, not for eating"Firm and ripe" means fragrant but still resistant to the thumb. Bosc and Anjou hold their shape; a soft Bartlett or Comice will collapse into sauce well before it browns.
- The sugar arithmeticHalf a cup is 8 tablespoons, and the method calls for a tablespoon per pear, which comes to 6. Either measure is workable; the extra two tablespoons are useful if the pears are large or tart.
- Cut side up, in a shallow dishThe original omits the vessel. Use a shallow baking dish just large enough to hold the halves in one layer, hollows facing up so the sugar and butter pool in the cored cavity rather than running off.
- A spoonful of liquidTwo or three tablespoons of water in the dish keeps the sugar from scorching before the fruit softens. It also produces a light syrup to spoon over at the table.
- ButterUnmeasured in the original. Six pears give twelve halves; two or three small bits on each will come to roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons in all, depending on how generous the bits are.
- BrowningIf the pears are tender before they have coloured, run them under the broiler for a minute or two. Sugar and butter will catch quickly, so watch them.
- YieldSix servings of two halves each, or twelve smaller portions. Good warm rather than hot; the whipped cream should be unsweetened, since the fruit carries the sugar.
Baked pears belong to the plainest end of the fruit-dessert tradition: fruit, sugar, butter, and heat, a formula that turns up in English and American cookery long before it was written down in books like this one. The recipe's presence in a meatless cookbook reflects the audience such volumes served in the early twentieth century: the growing number of vegetarians and food reformers who wanted a full menu rather than a list of substitutes. A dessert of baked fruit with whipped cream needed no apology. The brown sugar is worth noting too: it was cheaper and less refined than white.