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Baked Pears
Wipe, quarter, and core pears. Put in a baking pan, sprinkle with sugar, then add enough water that pears will not burn. Cover and cook in a very slow oven until tender.
A bare-bones invalid-cookery recipe that assumes a coal range with a cooling oven. The whole method rests on very low, very long heat, which is what turns hard cooking pears translucent instead of mushy.
- "Very slow oven"Read that as 250-275F. A modern 300F "slow" setting is already warmer than the residual heat these recipes were written for, and the pears will collapse before they colour.
- TimeNo time is given because it depends entirely on the fruit. Firm, underripe pears want 2 to 3 hours covered; a ripe Bartlett may be tender in 45 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Which pearsThe recipe suits hard, dense fruit — Bosc, Anjou, or the old stewing varieties that were never pleasant raw. Very ripe pears at this temperature will go to sauce.
- "Enough water that pears will not burn"About a quarter inch in the bottom of the pan is plenty in a covered dish. The pears release their own juice as they soften, and too much water dilutes it to nothing.
- CoveringA lid or foil is not optional here; it traps steam and keeps the exposed edges from drying to leather over a long bake. Uncover for the last fifteen minutes only if you want the syrup thicker.
- SugarThe recipe says only "sprinkle with sugar"; no quantity is given. A tablespoon or two per pound keeps it restrained. Add more if you are serving these as pudding.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. Four medium pears would feed three or four people. They keep several days covered in the refrigerator and are as good cold as warm.
Baked and stewed fruit was a fixture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century invalid cookery, and many community cookbooks of the period gave it a chapter of its own. Medical advice of the era favoured soft, bland, low-fat food for fevers and convalescence, and long-cooked fruit — apples, pears, prunes — was held to be gentle on the stomach and mildly laxative, an ongoing preoccupation in sickroom nursing. The very slow oven was practical as well: a wood or coal range held usable heat for some time after the cooking fire had died back, and a covered pan of pears could be pushed to the back and left. The Philathea cookbooks were compiled by Philathea classes, the women's Bible-study classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement, which began in the 1890s and was widespread in the early twentieth century; church-society collections of this kind commonly gathered practical household knowledge alongside recipes for company meals.