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Baked Pears
Place in a stone jar, first a layer of pears (without parting); then a layer of sugar, then pears, and so on until the jar is full. Then put in as much water as it will hold. Bake in oven three hours.
A slow oven-stew of whole pears in their own syrup, of the kind that turns hard cooking fruit soft and deep red. The original gives no quantities and no temperature, so the judgment is all in the vessel and the heat.
- "Without parting"The pears go in whole rather than halved or cored; the recipe says nothing about peeling, so whole and unpeeled is the likely reading. Small, firm cooking pears (Seckel, Bosc, or any hard windfall variety) are most likely to hold their shape through three hours; ripe Bartletts will collapse into sauce.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock, which packs the fruit close and limits evaporation. A deep ovenproof casserole or a bean pot does the same job. Crowding the pears rather than spreading them out suits the method.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no oven at all; three hours suggests a slow one, and around 300F is a reasonable modern guess. Any hotter and the water boils away before the fruit has softened. Covering the jar is not in the original but helps retain the liquid.
- How much sugarUnspecified in the original. Layering suggests a generous hand; about 1 cup of sugar to 2 lb of pears gives a syrup rather than a sweet soup. Hard, sour fruit will take more.
- "As much water as it will hold"The original says to fill the jar; in practice, stopping just below the top layer of fruit avoids a boil-over, since the pears release liquid as they cook.
- The colourLong, slow cooking with sugar can turn some pears from pale to a rosy garnet, though this depends on the variety. If they are still straw-coloured at three hours, more time at the same low heat is safer than a hotter oven.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no quantity; a 2-quart jarful would serve roughly six to eight, warm or cold, with the syrup spooned over and cream alongside. Leftovers keep for several days refrigerated.
Baked pears belong to the economy of the fruit cellar rather than the dessert course. Nineteenth-century North American orchards were full of hard, gritty cooking pears that were inedible raw and were preserved or stewed for hours until sugar and time made them palatable unces and baked apples. The stone jar is the giveaway: households owned glazed crocks for salting, pickling and storing. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by local women and sold for charity, which is why so many of its entries read like this one han knknows what a pear should look like when it is done, with no quantities and no clock beyond the three hours.