Home › Fruit Desserts › Stuffed Baked Pears
Stuffed Baked Pears
Pare and core large pears and stuff with seeded dates, raisins chopped nuts or chopped nuts with some tart marmalade or shredded coconut. 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 sketch rather than a recipe, in the terse style Butterick used for fruit desserts. The duplicated phrase in the second sentence is a typesetting slip, not a second filling.
- "Bake slowly"No temperature is given; a modern oven at roughly 300-325F answers the description. Pears tend to hold their shape at that heat, while a hotter oven risks the outer flesh collapsing before the middle softens.
- Choose a firm pearBosc and Anjou hold up to an hour of baking. Bartlett and Comice go to sauce. The pears should be ripe enough to smell like pears but still resist a thumb at the shoulder.
- CoringHalve them lengthwise and scoop the core with a melon baller or teaspoon, or leave them whole and work an apple corer up from the blossom end, leaving the stem end closed so the filling stays put. Whole pears take longer, closer to an hour.
- Water in the panAbout a quarter inch is enough. It steams the underside and keeps the sugars from scorching; more than that and the fruit poaches rather than bakes.
- The filling needs no cookingDates, raisins, nuts and coconut only need to be chopped small enough to pack tightly. Toasting the nuts first is worth the five minutes, since they will not brown inside the fruit.
- SweeteningNone is specified; the dates and marmalade carry the sweetness here. A spoonful of sugar or honey over each pear, or a little of the water replaced with cider, gives you a syrup to spoon over at the table.
- Timing and donenessHalves take 35-45 minutes, whole pears 50-70. A skewer should meet no resistance at the thickest part. Baste once or twice with the pan liquid if the tops look dry.
- YieldOne large pear per person, or two halves. Best warm rather than hot, with cream or a spoonful of the pan syrup.
Butterick was a pattern company that sold household books to the same women who bought its dress patterns, and this entry has the shape of its genre: a technique compressed to three sentences, with a list of substitutions so the cook can use whatever is in the house. Baked stuffed fruit belonged to the era's thrifty dessert repertoire, using firm pears and filling them with the store-cupboard sweets of the period, seeded dates and raisins, nuts, shredded coconut and marmalade. Dates and coconut in particular had become cheap and widely available in American groceries. The instruction to pack the pears "close together in a baking-dish" may well be practical rather than decorative: crowded fruit props itself upright and holds its steam.