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Stewed Prunes and Pears
Prepare the same quantity of prunes exactly as in No. 1, but just before placing them on the fire add six halves of medium, not overripe, sound pears, peeled and cored. If fresh pears are not at hand, the same quantity of preserved will answer.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the preceding stewed prune recipe in front of you. What follows fills in what the entry leaves unsaid.
- The missing base recipe"No. 1" is the plain stewed prune recipe elsewhere in the same numbered series; its ingredients and method are not reproduced here, so its contents are unknown from this page alone. Without that page you are working from a fragment; treat any modern stewed-prune method as the base.
- Quantity is undefinedThe original gives no weight for the prunes at all, only "the same quantity." Six pear halves would suggest a modest quantity of prunes, but the recipe gives no figure to work from.
- Prunes have changedEarly-20th-century prunes were hard, dry and needed hours of soaking. Modern pitted prunes are sold moist and pre-softened; they need no soak and perhaps 10 to 15 minutes of simmering, or they collapse into a puree.
- The hinge: add the pears lateThe instruction to add them "just before placing them on the fire" suggests the pears were expected to cook alongside the prunes for the whole time. Firm modern pears want about 15 to 20 minutes; if you are using softened prunes, give the pears a head start of five minutes instead and let the prunes join them.
- Choosing pears"Medium, not overripe, sound" points to a firm pear; Bosc or Anjou will hold their shape better than a ripe Bartlett, which will disintegrate. The recipe specifies halves, peeled and cored.
- Preserved pearsThese are canned or bottled pears in syrup. They are already cooked, so add them in the last two or three minutes only to heat through, and cut back the sugar in the base to account for the syrup.
- ServingServe warm or thoroughly chilled, with the cooking syrup spooned over. Stewed prunes commonly appeared at breakfast or as a light dessert in this period.
Stewed dried fruit was a fixture of American and European tables well into the 20th century, and prunes in particular were the reliable winter fruit: cheap, shelf-stable, and by the 1890s produced in large quantities in California's Santa Clara Valley, which was coming to compete with imports from France's Agen district. Pairing them with pears may be a seasonal economy as much as a flavour idea, since pears keep reasonably well in a cool cellar; the alternative of preserved pears could mean home put-up jars or commercially canned fruit, both available. That the entry is written as a cross-reference to "No. 1" is typical of the numbered-recipe format of the era, where a base preparation was given once and then rung through a series of variations.