No. 3692

Stewed Pears

Compote de Poires

Cut some fine ripe pears in two or four, but if small keep whole; throw them into a saucepan containing cold water; blanch in hot water acidulated with the juice of a lemon; drain, range in a vessel, and cover with a boiling twenty-eight degree syrup; leave them in this until cold, then drain, dress and pour over the syrup after reducing it.

← No. 3691 Stewed Peaches or Apricots Preserves & Conserves No. 3693 Stewed Pineapple →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional pastry kitchen where a syrup hydrometer sits by the stove. Once you translate the degree scale, this is a straightforward poached-pear compote.

Twenty-eight degree syrupThe scale is Baumé, read with a saccharometer. Twenty-eight degrees corresponds to a specific gravity near 1.24, about 50 to 52 percent sugar by weight — in practice roughly equal weights of sugar and water, boiled until clear.
Pears that hold their shapeChoose firm-ripe fruit: Bosc, Anjou or an underripe Bartlett. Fully soft dessert pears collapse in hot syrup and there is no rescuing them once they do.
The cold-water startDropping the cut fruit into cold water is not a cooking step; it keeps the flesh from browning between the knife and the pot. Acidulated water works better still, and the lemon juice in the blanching water does the same job.
Blanch means barely poachBring the acidulated water to a bare simmer and cook only until a knife tip meets slight resistance — 5 to 10 minutes for halves, less for small whole pears. They finish softening as they cool in the syrup.
Steeping, not simmeringThe hinge of the recipe: the pears cook in the residual heat of the boiling syrup as it cools. That slow, even absorption is what makes the flesh translucent instead of mealy. Cover them fully and leave them until the syrup is cold, ideally overnight.
Reducing the syrupAfter draining, boil the syrup down until it coats a spoon lightly; the Baumé reading rises as the syrup reduces, though Ranhofer gives no target. Take it off before it takes on colour; caramel notes do not belong here.
Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; two pounds of pears, about four to six, would serve four to six. Serve cool with the reduced syrup poured over, alone or with a spoonful of cream, and keep no more than three or four days refrigerated — this is a compote, not a sealed preserve.

A Little History

Compote, from the same root as English "composite," is fruit cooked in syrup and served in that syrup, a preparation distinct from both jam and the sealed preserve, and one that French kitchens made in small quantities for the day's service. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working manual for that kind of kitchen, which is why the syrup here is specified by hydrometer degree rather than by cups: a pastry cook working through a run of compotes, glazes and candied fruit measured sugar density the way a butcher measured weight. The Baumé scale, devised by the French chemist Antoine Baumé in the eighteenth century, remained standard in confectionery long after Brix displaced it elsewhere, and it still appears in French pastry texts today. The near-identical numbered entries on either side of this one — stewed peaches, apricots, pineapple — show the method was a template, applied to whatever fruit the season brought in.