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Baked Pears
Peel, cut in halves, and core twelve large pears, put them into a pan with two dozen cloves, one pound of sugar, and nearly enough water to cover them. Bake them in a moderate oven till tender, keeping the pan covered; then place them over a slow fire and let them stew gently. Grate a little lemon peel over them and add more sugar if required.
A plain fruit compote finished in two stages — baked covered, then reduced on the stovetop. The only real skill is choosing pears firm enough to survive both.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in a book of this vintage is usually taken as somewhere around 350F (period ranges run about 325-375F). Covered, twelve halved pears will take 35-50 minutes depending on ripeness; test with a skewer at the thick end rather than by the clock.
- Pear varietyUse Bosc or Anjou, still firm to the thumb. Bartletts at eating ripeness collapse into sauce during the second, stovetop stage, and the whole point of the two-part cooking is to keep the halves intact while the syrup thickens.
- The sugar is a syrup, not a coatingOne pound (about 2 1/4 cups) of sugar with water "nearly enough to cover" gives a light poaching syrup that reduces as the pears sit over low heat. Do not add so much water that the pears float; they should be three-quarters submerged so the exposed tops color slightly.
- Two dozen clovesThat is one per pear half, two per whole pear, and whole cloves are meant, so they can be picked out before serving. Ground cloves at that quantity would be overwhelming and would cloud the syrup.
- The stovetop stage"A slow fire" is the lowest steady heat you have; the recipe specifies a lid only for the baking, so leaving it off here will let the liquid concentrate. Reducing to a spoon-coating syrup may take a good while; if the pears are already very soft, lift them out and reduce the liquid alone.
- Lemon peelGrate it in at the end, off the heat if possible. Cooked long, zest can turn bitter, and the recipe does call for it only at the finish.
- Yield and servingTwelve pears, halved, serves eight to twelve. Serve warm or chilled in the syrup, with cream, or alongside roast pork or a firm cheese.
Baked and stewed pears belong to a long line of European fruit compotes that arrived in American cookery — pears keep for weeks in a cool cellar, and sugar-and-clove poaching turns even a hard, half-ripe specimen into something worth serving. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's legendary maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896. The clove-and-lemon pairing here is old and conservative, a seasoning often said to have long been used by English cooks for baked pears.