Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stuffed Pears
Stuffed Pears
Select a large pear, not too ripe, and peel it, but do not remove the stalk. Cut the pear lengthwise about two-thirds of its height from the side on which it is lying. Take out the inside with a vegetable-spoon. Cook the pieces of pear by boiling in a little sugar and water, but keep them firm, and leave in the syrup till cold. Drain the pear on a cloth. Put a layer of cooked rice and cream on a dish, put the thick part of the pear on it, fill the hollow with a salpicon of fruits thickened with a little apricot marmalade, put the other piece of pear on the top, and arrange a circle of crystallized green gages round it. Reduce the syrup flavor with a little vanilla extract, and pour it, when cold, over the pear.
A composed French dessert written in kitchen shorthand: a poached pear lid-cut and stuffed, set on rice pudding and glazed with its own reduced syrup. Almost everything here is assembly, so the only real cooking question is how firm the pear stays.
- The hinge: underpoach the pearThe pear must hold a clean cut edge after it is hollowed, filled and capped, so stop while it still resists a skewer. Eight to twelve minutes at a bare simmer is usually enough for a firm Bosc or Anjou; cooling it in the syrup finishes the job without collapse.
- "Not too ripe"Choose a pear that is still hard at the shoulder. Ripe supermarket Bartletts will slump the moment the core is scooped out.
- The cut, as describedLay the pear on its side and take off a lid parallel to the work surface, at about two-thirds of the pear's height. The recipe says only that the stalk is not to be removed; presumably it stays with the upper piece. The larger, lower portion becomes the cup.
- Vegetable-spoonA parisienne scoop or melon baller. Whether the trimmings it removes are the 'pieces of pear' that get poached is not stated; that phrase may equally mean the two cut portions, which are what is drained and reassembled.
- SalpiconIn period French usage, anything cut into small neat dice. Here it means the poached pear scraps plus other cooked or candied fruit, bound with a spoonful of apricot jam so the filling holds together rather than weeping.
- Sugar and water are unspecifiedThe original gives no ratio. A light poaching syrup of roughly one part sugar to two parts water by volume suits the method, but the quantity is genuinely left to the cook.
- Rice and creamThis is riz à la Condé in all but name: short-grain rice cooked soft in sweetened milk, then loosened with cream. Cool it to room temperature before plating or it will soften the pear.
- Crystallized green gagesCandied greengage plums, once a standard confectioner's line and now hard to find. Candied cherries, angelica, or halved candied apricots give the same ring of colour.
- The glazeReduce the poaching syrup until it coats a spoon, add vanilla off the heat, and cool it fully. Poured warm it will melt the rice and dull the fruit.
- YieldOne pear serves one person. The recipe is written per portion, with no yield and no quantities given.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 cook book records the grammar of a late nineteenth-century American hotel kitchen working in French. Stuffed pears of this kind belong to the family of fruit desserts built on a bed of sweet rice — the Condé presentations codified in French professional cooking of the period — where the rice supplies body, the poached fruit the centrepiece, and candied fruit the colour. The greengage in the garnish points to the same world: a green-gold dessert plum, generally traced in England to Sir Thomas Gage's plantings in the early eighteenth century and known in France as Reine Claude, which confectioners crystallized in quantity. That such a dish is written out portion by portion, with no yield and no quantities, tells you who the book was really for: cooks who already knew what a salpicon was and needed only the arrangement.