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Pear Pie, with Cinnamon
Peel and cut in half eight medium, sound pears, remove the seeds, then finely slice them and place in a bowl. Season with one ounce sugar and a teaspoon ground cinnamon. Mix well. Line a lightly buttered pie plate with a thin pie paste. Place the pears in the pie plate, lightly egg the edges of the plate; cover the pears with another similar layer of pie paste; make a few small incisions on the surface, press down the two layers of paste around the border of the plate; lightly egg the surface. Set to bake in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, let rest on a table for five minutes, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve either hot or cold.
A plain two-crust fruit pie of the kind found in continental hotel kitchens, written for a cook who already knows how oven and pastry behave. Two things need filling in: the oven temperature and the question of juice.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 400-425F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then drop to 375F to finish. Thirty minutes is realistic only at that heat; check that the fruit is tender through a slit before pulling it.
- One ounce of sugar is not a typoThat is about 2 tablespoons for eight pears — barely sweet by modern dessert standards, which is the point. If your pears are underripe or you want a sweeter pie, 1/3 cup is still restrained. The dusting of sugar at the end does some of the work.
- Choose the pears carefully"Sound" means firm and unbruised. Bosc or Anjou hold their slices; Bartlett at full ripeness collapses into liquid and floods the crust. The recipe includes no flour, cornstarch or breadcrumbs, so the fruit must be the kind that does not weep.
- If the pears are very juicyToss a tablespoon of flour or two teaspoons of cornstarch through the slices, or scatter a spoonful of fine dry breadcrumbs over the bottom crust before filling. Neither is in the original, and neither is needed with firm fruit.
- "Lightly egg"A beaten whole egg, or yolk loosened with a teaspoon of water, brushed thinly. On the rim it acts as glue between the two crusts; on the top it gives colour.
- Powdered sugarThe term of the period covers finely ground sugar; confectioners' sugar is the usual modern stand-in. Sprinkle it after the five-minute rest, while the surface is still warm enough to take it but no longer steaming, or it dissolves into patches.
- RestingFive minutes is enough to serve it hot in a spoonful, but not enough for clean wedges. Allow 30 to 40 minutes if you want the slices to hold.
- YieldNo plate size is given; roughly six to eight servings.
Pear pies sit slightly apart from the apple pies that dominate English and American baking, largely because pears ripen fast and unevenly and were more often poached, preserved or baked whole in wine. Cinnamon with pear is an old pairing across northern Europe. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it gathers straightforward domestic dishes — hence the terse phrasing, the assumption that the reader knows what "thin pie paste" and a properly heated oven mean, and the note that the pie may be served hot or cold.