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Stewed Pears
Cut some pears lengthwise in halves and remove the cores. Place them in a stewpan the cut side upwards; put in half a pound of sugar, pour over them one gill of red wine and sufficient cold water to cover. Add a few cloves and the thinly-pared rind of a lemon and stew them gently at the side of the fire. When tender, arrange the pears on a dish, strain their syrup through a fine hair-sieve over them, and serve.
A plain compote of the kind that closed a Waldorf dinner: the technique is all in the heat, which should never rise above a bare tremble. The original gives no pear count, so scale the sugar and wine to what fits your pan in one layer.
- Quantities and yieldA gill is a half cup (4 fl oz) in American usage, 5 fl oz in British books; either works here. Half a pound of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons, which suits roughly 6 to 8 halved pears — a syrup for four to six servings.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range, the pan was drawn off the hot centre to a cooler edge for a heat that barely moves the liquid. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, lid off, with the surface shivering rather than bubbling. A rolling boil will break the pears into mush before the centres soften.
- Choose firm fruitBosc and Anjou hold their shape; ripe Bartlett and Comice will collapse. Slightly underripe pears are the right choice for stewing.
- Cut side upThe recipe specifies it without saying why; presumably the hollowed cores face upward so the cavities fill with syrup rather than trapping air.
- TimingNo time is given because it depends on ripeness. Expect 20 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer at the thickest part of the fruit.
- The wineA dry red — a light Bordeaux or a Pinot Noir — gives the ruby colour the dish is after. Sweet fortified wine on top of half a pound of sugar makes the syrup cloying.
- Hair sieveA nineteenth-century fine sieve of woven horsehair. Any fine mesh strainer or a chinois does the job; the point is to catch the cloves and lemon peel, not to clarify.
- The syrupPoured over as written it will be thin. Lifting the pears out and reducing the strained liquid by half over brisk heat, then cooling it, gives a syrup that coats. Serve warm or thoroughly chilled, with cream if you like.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was assembled at a moment when American hotel cooking still worked straight out of the English and French domestic tradition, and this is that tradition unaltered: pears stewed in red wine with cloves and lemon rind appear in English cookery books through the whole nineteenth century, and the same combination underlies the French poires au vin rouge. Wine-stewed pears were valued partly because hard cooking pears — varieties bred to keep through winter and nearly inedible raw — were common in orchards and markets, and long gentle stewing was among the surest ways to make them palatable. The instruction to set the pan at the side of the fire points to a way of working with heat that belongs to the open hearth as much as to the coal range, where cooks controlled heat by moving pots across the top rather than by turning anything down.