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Baked Pears
1113. These need not be of a fine sort; some taste better than others, and often those that are least fit to eat raw. Wipe, but do not pare, lay them on tin plates, and bake them in a slow oven. When soft enough to bear it, flatten them with a silver-spoon. When done through, put them on a dish. They should be baked three or four times, and very gently.
A method rather than a formula: hard, unpromising pears turned soft and sweet by long, repeated baking at low heat. Nothing is added, so the result depends entirely on patience.
- Slow ovenRead this as 275-300F. Anything hotter will split the skins and dry the flesh before the sugars have time to concentrate.
- The three or four bakingsThis is the hinge. The recipe gives no times: the pears go in, come out, and go back, the cycle repeated three or four times, which in practice means spreading the work over more than one heating. Each cycle drives off more water and darkens the flesh; a single long bake gives soft pears rather than the concentrated ones intended here.
- Tin platesShallow baking tins or sheets. Line with parchment, since the juices caramelise and set hard.
- Skins onThe recipe is explicit: wipe but do not pare. The skin helps the fruit hold together through repeated handling and flattening, so leave it on.
- The silver spoonSilver was probably specified because iron and steel were thought to discolour or taint fruit. Any modern stainless or wooden implement is fine. Press gently, and only once the pear yields, as the recipe directs.
- Choice of fruitThe advice holds: firm, gritty, under-ripe pears such as cooking or perry varieties work far better than a ripe Comice, which will simply melt. Bosc or hard windfalls are good candidates.
- Yield and servingReckon on one or two pears a person. Serve warm or cold, with cream if you like; any juices that collect on the plate are worth spooning over. They keep for a few days covered in the refrigerator.
Baked pears of this kind belong to the older English practice of using the oven's falling heat rather than firing it specially — fruit went in as the bread came out and stayed there through the cooling, sometimes over several days and several bakings. That is why the instruction is to bake three or four times and very gently: the cook was working with residual warmth, not a dial. The technique also solves a real problem of the period, since many orchard and hedgerow pears were hard, astringent and barely edible raw, grown as much for perry as for the table. Long slow heat breaks down their tannic flesh and darkens it, and the same principle survives in the French poires tapées and in the dried, flattened pears once sold at country fairs.