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Pear Dumplings
Make a good pastry, and cut it in pieces large enough to enclose a medium-sized pear; peel some pears, leaving them whole, and keeping the stem intact, enclose them in pastry, brush them over with beaten egg, and bake them in a moderate over, Serve them, either hot or cold, with powdered sugar or sauce.
Oscar assumes you know his pastry and his oven; the recipe as printed leaves out the two things that decide whether the dumplings work. Both are easy to supply.
- Core the pearsThe instruction to leave the pear whole with its stem does not mean leave the core in. Work a corer or a small knife up from the blossom end, leaving the stem end intact, so the fruit cooks evenly and the cavity can take sugar and a clove or a knob of butter.
- "A moderate over" is a typo for ovenModerate in this period is usually read as somewhere around 350 to 375F, though sources vary. The book gives no times, but a hotter start of about 400F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until a skewer goes through the fruit without resistance, works well.
- Pastry choice"a good pastry" here is most likely a short crust rather than puff; puff is harder to keep in shape around a whole pear as the fruit shrinks. A plain crust of about 2 parts flour to 1 part butter, barely moistened, will serve, though the book does not specify.
- Pear variety and ripenessUse firm, barely ripe Bosc or Anjou. A fully ripe Bartlett is apt to go soft and watery inside the crust and may split the seams.
- SealingRoll each square about 1/8 inch thick and roughly 7 inches across for a medium pear. Bring the corners up around the fruit, pleat, and press the seams with a wet finger; the egg wash both glazes and glues. Set them apart on a lined sheet so leaking syrup does not weld them together.
- Sauce"Sauce" here means a sweet pudding sauce of the era: hard sauce, a thin custard, or a vanilla cream. Any of the three suits, and a little of the pears' poaching or baking juices thinned with cream also works.
- YieldOne dumpling per person. A batch of pastry made with 2 cups flour will wrap about four medium pears.
Fruit baked whole in a pastry jacket is much older than the Waldorf, and the apple version was standard in English and American cookery well before Oscar Tschirky compiled his book in 1896. One striking detail is the stem left standing: a dumpling that arrives at the table with the pear's stalk poking through the crust announces at once that the fruit inside is whole, not stewed. The book's brevity is typical of it. Oscar wrote for cooks who already had a pastry in their repertoire and an oven they knew by feel.