Baked Pears
Wash the pears, and unless they are small quarter and core them. Place them in a deep pudding dish, well sprinkled with sugar.
Add water sufficient to keep them from burning; cover and bake for two or three hours in a slow oven. If desired, a piece of stick cinnamon may be put in the pan with the pears; this will improve the flavor.
A long, low bake that turns hard cooking pears soft and syrupy. The only real variables are the pear, the oven temperature and how tightly the dish is covered.
- Slow ovenSomewhere in the 250-325F range; 300F is a reasonable reading. At that heat two to three hours suits firm, underripe fruit; ripe supermarket pears will soften much sooner, so start checking well before the two-hour mark.
- Choose a hard pearThe recipe assumes a dense cooking pear of the kind still sold as Bosc or Seckel, or a windfall too hard to eat raw. Bartlett or Comice will turn to sauce over three hours.
- Deep pudding dishAny deep, straight-sided ovenproof dish. It matters that the fruit sits close together in one or two layers so the little water and the pear juice pool rather than spread and scorch.
- "Water sufficient"About half a cup for two pounds of fruit, enough to film the bottom. Covered and slow, the pears give up plenty of their own liquid; too much water at the start leaves you with thin syrup.
- SugarNo quantity is given. A quarter cup per pound of fruit suits a tart cooking pear; less if the pears are ripe. The sugar draws juice out and thickens it into syrup as the bake goes on.
- CoverA lid or foil is what makes this work, trapping steam so the fruit poaches rather than dries. Removing the cover for the last 20 minutes reduces the syrup and colors the tops.
- CinnamonOne stick for the whole dish is enough; three hours of gentle heat extracts a great deal. Remove it before serving.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of pears serves four. Good warm with the pan syrup spooned over, with cream, or cold as a compote — it keeps a few days refrigerated.
Baking hard fruit slowly in a covered dish is one of the oldest uses for a cooling oven — the bread came out, the pears went in, and the residual heat did the work overnight. Pears in particular reward it: the stone cells and firm flesh that make an unripe pear unpleasant raw break down completely under hours of gentle moist heat, and the flesh can turn a deep rose color, an effect often attributed to the fruit's tannins. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks carry many versions of this, sometimes with claret or vinegar and cloves instead of the cinnamon here. A recipe like this one — no quantities, no timings tighter than "two or three hours" — assumes the cook already knows her fruit and her stove.