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Candied Pear Paste
Boil some pear marmalade till greatly reduced in quantity. Color half of it with a few drops of prepared cochineal, turn each half on a clean plate, and leave till they are cold. With some tin cutters cut the paste into squares, diamonds, ovals, leaves, rings, etc.; dip each with a fork in a carameled syrup, place them out of hand on a trellised wire drainer, and leave them till dry.
This is a French pâte de fruits written in shorthand for a professional pastry department: fruit paste reduced until it sets, cut into shapes, and glazed in hot sugar. The hinge is how far you take the reduction — underdone paste will never cut cleanly or hold a shape in the syrup.
- "Pear marmalade" means thick puree, not preserveIn nineteenth-century usage this most likely means cooked pear pulp sieved smooth and sweetened, closer to a heavy fruit butter than to a jarred jam with chunks. To work from scratch, figure on about 3 lb of ripe pears cooked down and passed through a sieve, sweetened to taste, rather than a supermarket jam thinned with pectin and citrus.
- How far to reduceBoil in a wide, heavy pan, stirring almost constantly at the end so the bottom does not scorch. It is ready when a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that holds and the mass pulls away from the sides in a single sheet — around 223–225°F on a candy thermometer. Expect to lose better than half the volume.
- Turning it out"A clean plate" works, but lining a shallow pan or plate with lightly oiled parchment makes the slab far easier to lift. Spread it a scant 1/2 inch thick and leave it uncovered overnight; the surface should be dry to the touch before you cut.
- Prepared cochinealA liquid red coloring made from the dried cochineal insect, kin to the carmine still sold as a natural red food color — worth knowing if you are cooking for vegetarians or anyone with a carmine sensitivity. A few drops go a long way; any red coloring gives the same two-tone effect the recipe is after.
- Carameled syrupA glazing syrup of sugar and water taken past hard crack (300–310°F) to the point where it just begins to take color, which is nearer 320°F. Keep it over the barest heat while you dip, or set the pan in a wider pan of hot water; taken much below hard crack the coating stays tacky instead of setting glassy.
- Dipping and drainingChill the cut shapes first so they hold together on the fork, and dip quickly — the paste is wet and will bleed moisture into the sugar if held too long. A cooling rack over a sheet pan does the work of the "trellised wire drainer."
- Humidity is the enemyA hard-crack glaze pulls water from the air and from the fruit beneath it. Dry the finished sweets in a warm dry room for a few hours, then store in a single layer in a tin between sheets of parchment; they are at their best within a day or two.
- YieldThe original gives none. A slab from 3 lb of pears, cut at 1 inch, makes roughly 40 to 50 pieces.
Fruit pastes of this kind are old confectionery work, the quince being the oldest of them: it is high in pectin and sets firmly on its own without gelatin or added pectin, which is why medieval and early modern kitchens made "marmalade" first from quinces (the Portuguese marmelo, from which the word descends) and only later from citrus. By the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel at the turn of the twentieth century, pâtes de fruits cut into diamonds, leaves and rings and glazed in caramel belonged to the petits fours and after-dinner sweets sent out with coffee, part of the same French repertoire the hotel's dining rooms were built on. The brevity of the instructions is telling: this was written for a confectioner who already knew the sugar stages by eye, and who had a drawer of tin cutters and a wire drainer within reach.