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Pear Tart
Core and peel a dozen or so of cooking-pears, fill up the cavity with sponge-cake soaked in sherry wine, place them in a pie-dish, pour over a liquor glassful of orange-flower water, sprinkle over a good supply of sugar, about half fill the dish with cold water, cover over the top with puff paste, glaze the surface, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve either hot or cold.
A deep-dish fruit pie in the English manner, with whole pears standing upright under a lid of puff paste. The original gives no baking time and no oven number, so both need supplying.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350–375F. The pears need long, gentle cooking; the pastry lid browns while the fruit steams beneath it. Expect 50 to 70 minutes depending on the ripeness and size of the pears.
- Cooking pearsFirm, dense varieties — Bosc, Anjou, or any hard pear that resists a thumbprint. Soft dessert pears such as ripe Bartlett collapse into sauce and will leave the crust floating over liquid.
- A liquor glassfulGenuinely imprecise. Nineteenth-century liqueur glasses ran roughly 1 to 2 fluid ounces. With orange-flower water the smaller end is safer; an ounce over a dozen pears is already assertive.
- Orange-flower waterSold in Middle Eastern and baking shops. Buy a distilled water, not a flavouring essence with alcohol and propylene glycol, which tastes of soap at this quantity.
- Coring wholeAn apple corer through the blossom end, leaving the pear intact, gives the cavity the recipe wants. The recipe says nothing about stems either way.
- The sponge-cake fillingAny plain sponge or pound cake, torn into plugs. The original says soaked in sherry; if the cake is very light, moistening rather than saturating will keep it from breaking down into the dish during the long bake.
- Half fill with waterThis is the steaming medium, not a sauce. Water should come no higher than halfway up the pears; more and the syrup stays thin and the underside of the lid goes soggy.
- Glaze the surfaceIn period usage this means brushed with beaten egg or egg white, and often dusted with caster sugar for the last few minutes. Cut a vent — a closed lid over that much steam will lift or split.
- YieldA dozen pears wants a deep two- to three-quart dish and serves eight to ten. Cold, the syrup sets slightly and the dish slices more cleanly than it does hot.
Fruit baked whole beneath a single sheet of pastry, in a deep dish rather than a pie plate, is a long-established English form — though in English usage such a deep covered fruit dish is more usually called a pie, tarts being typically shallow — and hard "cooking" or "stewing" pears — varieties too gritty and astringent to eat raw — existed precisely for it. The sherry-soaked sponge in the cavity is sometimes said to be a borrowing from trifle. Orange-flower water dates the dish more than anything else on the page: distilled from bitter orange blossom, it was a standard confectioner's flavouring from the seventeenth century onward and was still in every well-stocked pastry room when Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, before vanilla extract crowded it out of American baking almost entirely.