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Stuffed Baked Pears
Pare and core large pears and stuff with seeded dates, raisins or chopped nuts with some tart marmalade or shredded coconut. Place close together in a baking-dish, cover bottom of pan with water and bake slowly until tender.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in 1920s magazine cookbooks, which assumed the cook knew what "slowly" meant and how long fruit takes. The main decisions left to you are pear variety, oven temperature and time.
- Choose a firm pearBosc and Anjou hold their shape well through long baking, while softer varieties such as Bartlett and Comice tend to break down. The pears should be ripe enough to smell sweet but still firm at the shoulder.
- Slow oven means 300-325F'Bake slowly' points to a low oven -- period usage for a slow oven runs roughly 250-325F. Expect large whole pears to need something on the order of an hour, less for smaller ones; bake until a skewer slides through the thickest part with no resistance.
- Coring a whole pearLeave the stem end intact and work up from the blossom end with an apple corer or a narrow melon baller, hollowing a channel wide enough to pack. Standing the pears upright in the dish keeps the filling from spilling.
- Water in the panAbout a quarter inch is enough — it is there to keep the fruit from scorching and to make a light syrup, not to poach the pears. Top it up if the dish threatens to go dry.
- SweeteningThe original relies entirely on the dried fruit and marmalade for sugar. If your pears are underripe, add a tablespoon or two of sugar or honey to the pan water, which will glaze the fruit as it reduces.
- Cover, then uncoverThe original says nothing about covering. If you want the pears to steam tender, bake covered for most of the time and finish uncovered for the last ten minutes to dry and brown the filling.
- Yield and servingOne pear per person, served warm with the pan syrup spooned over, and cream or a spoonful of thick yogurt alongside.
New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's women's magazine, and it carries that magazine's habit of compressing a dish into two or three sentences of practical shorthand. Baked whole fruit was a staple of the era's dessert repertoire: cheap, requiring no pastry skill, and fitting neatly into the period's interest in fruit as a wholesome ending to a meal rather than a rich one. The list of possible stuffings here — dates, raisins, nuts, marmalade, shredded coconut — reflects what a well-stocked 1920s American pantry held in packets and jars, coconut and dates in particular having become widely available through the growth of packaged grocery lines in the preceding decades. Recipes written this loosely were a form of trust in the reader, who was expected to supply the quantities, the timing and her own judgment about her oven.