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Pear Marquise
Neatly peel six medium, even-sized, fresh pears, without cutting away the stems. Have a pint water in a saucepan with four ounces sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence; place on the fire and as soon as it boils drop in the pears. Cover the pan and let gently boil for twenty-five minutes. Lift up the pears with a skimmer and keep on a plate; add two tablespoons maraschino to the syrup and let reduce on the fire to a good gill.
Have in another saucepan one pint boiling milk, add three ounces sugar, three ounces raw rice and the chopped rind of quarter of a lemon; let gently boil for thirty minutes, occasionally mixing at the bottom to prevent burning. Dress the rice on a large dish, arrange the pears on top, pour the sauce around and serve.
A poached-pear dessert set on a stovetop rice pudding, in the style of the late-nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the measures and one of the ingredients need translating.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: 4 fluid ounces (half a cup) by American measure, 5 by imperial. Reducing a pint of poaching syrup plus 2 tablespoons of maraschino to that point takes a good while at a fast simmer, and with four ounces of sugar in it the result will be a thick, sweet syrup.
- Raw rice means uncookedThree ounces is about a scant half cup. Use a short- or medium-grain rice (Arborio, Valencia, or pudding rice); long-grain will not release enough starch to bind the dish.
- The rice needs watching, not just stirring at the endThirty minutes of gentle boiling will scorch on a thin pan, which is why the recipe says to mix at the bottom. Use a heavy saucepan on low heat and stir often; add a splash more milk if it tightens before the grains are tender.
- Poaching time depends on ripenessTwenty-five minutes suits firm, barely ripe pears such as Bosc or Anjou. Ripe fruit will collapse well before that, so test with a skewer from 12 minutes on and lift them out as soon as they give no resistance at the neck.
- MaraschinoThe clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. Luxardo is the usual bottling. Kirsch is the closest substitute; the syrup from cocktail cherries is not.
- Vanilla essenceRead as vanilla extract. A teaspoon in a pint of syrup is generous by modern standards, and a split half-pod simmered in the water gives a cleaner flavour.
- Peeling with the stems onThe stems are the whole point of the presentation, so pare from the neck downward with a swivel peeler and core from the base with a melon baller if you want them to sit upright.
- Yield and servingSix pears, so six servings. Assemble while both elements are warm; the rice sets firm as it cools and the reduced syrup thickens considerably in the pan.
"Marquise" was one of the aristocratic labels that turn-of-the-century restaurant kitchens attached to composed desserts -- alongside duchesse, impératrice and princesse -- and it seems to have signalled style rather than any fixed formula. The underlying construction here is a sweetened rice cooked in milk with lemon zest, used as a base for poached fruit and a spirit-laced syrup. Pears took to this treatment particularly well because they hold their shape in sugar syrup, and the same logic produced the better-known poire Belle Hèlene of the same era. Maraschino, the cherry-kernel liqueur from Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was a staple of professional pastry work in this period and appears throughout books of the type, long before American Prohibition reduced the name to a jar of coloured cherries.