Pears, Baked
INGREDIENTS for dish for 10 persons. -12 pears, the rind of 1 lemon, 6 cloves, 10 whole allspice; to every pint of water allow 1/2 lb. of loaf sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Pare and cut the pears into halves, and, should they be very large, into quarters; leave the stalks on, and carefully remove the cores. Place them in a clean bakingjar, with a closely-fitting lid; add to them the lemon-rind cut in strips, the juice of 1/2 lemon, the cloves, pounded allspice, and sufficient water just to cover the whole, with sugar in the above proportion. Cover the jar down closely, put it into a very cool oven, and bake the pears from 5 to 6 hours, PEARS, MOULD. but be very careful that the oven is not too hot. To improve the colour of the fruit, a few drops of prepared cochineal may be added; but this will not be found necessary, if the pears are very gently baked.
TIME.-Large pears, 5 to 6 hours, in a very slow oven.
SEASONABLE from September to January.
This is a long, slow oven-poach in syrup rather than a bake in any modern sense. Almost everything depends on the oven staying very low and the jar staying sealed.
- "A very cool oven"Treat this as the lowest useful setting, somewhere around 250-275F. The whole point is that the syrup should barely tremble rather than boil; too hot an oven breaks the fruit up, and Beeton herself warns twice that the oven must not be too hot.
- The pears matter more than the recipeA six-hour bake implies hard cooking or stewing pears of the old "warden" type, which hold their shape; Beeton does not name a variety, but she does specify large pears and a very slow oven. Firm Conference or Bosc will cook far faster, and a ripe Comice will collapse. Use the hardest, greenest pears you can find, and start checking with a skewer well before the stated time.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up; ordinary granulated is the direct substitute.
- The syrup ratioHalf a pound of sugar to a pint of water, roughly 1 cup of sugar to 2 1/2 cups of water in US measure, since her pint is the imperial 20 fl oz. A moderate syrup, not a heavy one. It should just cover the fruit and no more, as she says.
- The baking jarAn earthenware or stoneware jar with a close-fitting lid. A lidded casserole or Dutch oven does the same job; if the lid is loose, seal the gap with foil, as evaporation will leave the top layer of pears dry and brown.
- Allspice and clovesShe calls for the allspice pounded; bruising the berries rather than reducing them to powder makes them easier to fish out and keeps the syrup clear. Six cloves and ten allspice to twelve pears is a light hand by the standards of spiced fruit.
- CochinealSkip it. Beeton says herself that it will not be needed if the pears are baked gently enough; long slow cooking darkens the fruit on its own. Cochineal is still sold as carmine, but it is unnecessary here.
- ServingHer own figure is ten. Serve cold in the syrup, with cream or a plain custard; if the syrup is thin after baking, lift the fruit out and boil the liquid down separately rather than baking on.
Baked or stewed pears in spiced syrup are a long-established British fruit dish, and they exist because of a category of pear that has largely disappeared from shops: the hard cooking or "warden" pear, gritty and near-inedible raw, which needed hours of gentle heat to become tender and which turned a deep red in the process. Wardens are recorded in English cookery and orchard writing from the medieval period onward, and pear varieties grown specifically for baking were still common in Victorian kitchen gardens. The long, cheap, unattended cooking would have suited a coal range that stayed warm overnight, and the September-to-January season Beeton gives most likely reflects the keeping season for stored pears. The cochineal note is a period habit rather than a necessity, and Beeton's own aside that gentle baking makes it unnecessary is the more useful instruction.