Baked Pears
Bake washed, unpeeled pears in pan with only a tea-spoon or two of water; sprinkle with the sugar, and serve with their own syrup.
A one-line recipe that assumes the cook knows what a baking pear is. The success of it rests entirely on the fruit and on covering the pan.
- Oven and timeThe book gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, covered, will usually take 40 to 60 minutes depending on size and ripeness; a very hard winter pear may need considerably longer. They are done when a skewer slides through the flesh without resistance.
- Cover the panWith only a teaspoon or two of water, an uncovered dish will simply dry out and the skins will scorch before the centres soften. Foil or a lid traps the steam and the fruit cooks in its own juice, which is what produces the "own syrup" the recipe promises.
- The right pearsThis suits firm cooking fruit -- Bosc, or the old hard local pears that were barely edible raw. A ripe Bartlett will collapse to sauce in the same time. Choose fruit that is still firm at the neck.
- Unpeeled and wholeThe skin holds the pear together and gives the syrup colour and a little tannic edge. Leave the stems on and stand the fruit upright; halved and cored pears will cook faster but give up more liquid.
- Sugar quantityUnspecified; the phrase "the sugar" assumes a quantity the cook already knows. Reckon roughly a tablespoon per pear. The recipe's wording puts the sprinkling after baking, though scattering it on at the start lets it dissolve into the juices. Sweeten to the fruit -- hard cooking pears take considerably more than dessert pears.
- ServingThe recipe gives no quantity or yield. Spoon the pan syrup over the pears and serve warm or cold, with cream if you like.
Baked fruit of this kind belongs to a period when households might have access to pears that were never meant to be eaten raw -- dense, gritty, astringent varieties that grew on long-lived trees and kept for months in a cool cellar. Slow baking was one common way to make them palatable, and it needed nothing but an oven that was already hot from the day's bread or roast, which is why recipes like this one are so terse. The Dixie Cook-Book, published in the 1880s in the American South, groups it among the plain fruit dishes, the sort of everyday sweet course that required no eggs, no cream and no particular skill. The absence of spice here is notable. Other versions of baked pears often add cloves, lemon or wine; this one trusts the fruit and a little sugar to be enough.