No. 3085

Pears Ferriere

Poires Ferriere

Peel some pears; hollow them with a vegetable spoon and cook in a light syrup; drain on a sieve and stuff them with powdered macaroons moistened with a little Curacoa; cover them with a coating of fine apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and bestrew with finely chopped pistachios. Butter and sugar a surtout mold and fill it to the top with rice and cream flavored with vanilla (No. 160) and finished with a few egg-yolks; set the mold in a sautoir with water reaching to half its height and put this into a slack oven to get firm; then unmold on a dish. Dress on the edge of the rice a circle of greengages alternated with small apple-shaped rice croquettes having their stalks made of pieces of angelica; range the pears inside of this circle dressed in a pyramid, and a moment before serving push the dish in the oven to heat well; serve separately the following sauce: Take very ripe pears; peel and cut in quarters, then cook them to a compote with some thirty-degree syrup; when the fruit is well cooked strain through a fine sieve to obtain a pulp; dilute this with the syrup in which they were boiled, adding also a few spoonfuls of kirsch. Sturtout molds are made of different sizes as follows: About three inches in diameter by half an inch high, or six inches in diameter by three-quarters on an inch high.

← No. 3084 Stevens Peaches Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3086 Lombarde Pears—Stuffed →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed pyramid dessert from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built in three parts: poached stuffed pears, a baked vanilla rice mould, and a pear-kirsch sauce. Read it as an assembly plan rather than a single recipe, and make the components in that order.

Slack ovenFor the rice mould set in its water bath, read "slack" as a cool oven, roughly 275-300F. The custard-bound rice only needs to set; higher heat will curdle the yolks and weep.
Sautoir and water bathA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan. Any roasting pan that will take the mould with water to half its depth does the same job.
Surtout mouldThe surtout was a low ring or plateau mould used to build a decorated centrepiece. The dimensions given in the original -- three to six inches across by half to three-quarters of an inch high -- are unusually shallow and are probably the border rings rather than the body of the mould; a shallow ring mould or a plain cake ring on the serving dish gives the same effect.
Thirty-degree syrupA Baume reading, about 55 percent sugar by weight (roughly 1.26 specific gravity), so noticeably more sugar than water. For the "light syrup" the pears poach in, go weaker -- about one part sugar to three of water -- or the fruit candies at the surface before it cooks through.
Curacoa and kirschCuracoa is orange curacao; a dry orange liqueur is the closest modern equivalent, as many bottlings sold now are sweeter and coloured. Kirsch is unsweetened cherry brandy, not cherry liqueur, and the sauce depends on that dryness.
MacaroonsRanhofer means crisp almond macaroons, the dry Italian amaretti type, not the coconut kind. Crush them to a coarse powder and moisten only until they clump; too much liqueur and the stuffing slumps out of the pear.
Greengages and angelicaGreengages are a green plum with a short late-summer season; poached green plums or halved poached apricots stand in. Candied angelica stems, once standard in every confectioner's cupboard, are now a specialist item -- a strip of candied citron or a clove stem does the same visual work.
Poaching the pearsFirm cooking pears hollowed with a melon baller need 15-25 minutes in simmering syrup depending on ripeness; test with a skewer at the shoulder. Overcooked, they collapse when you stack them in a pyramid.
YieldRanhofer gives no quantities. Built on a six-inch ring with six to eight pears it would serve about eight; the amount of sauce is left entirely to the cook.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house style at its most architectural: fruit, a moulded rice, croquettes shaped and stalked to look like miniature apples, all dressed into a pyramid and warmed through at the last moment. Rice cooked in milk with vanilla and bound with yolks was a workhorse of nineteenth-century French pastry precisely because it unmoulds cleanly and holds a decorated border. The name is sometimes said to honour the Rothschild estate of Ferrières, though the book offers no explanation; Ranhofer, French-trained and steadily nodding toward Paris in his nomenclature, attaches such names throughout the book without explanation. The reliance on apricot marmalade as a glaze, chopped pistachios as the finish, and angelica for green accents is standard confectioner's practice of the period rather than anything particular to this dish.