poached pears
(vegan)

recipe by m-c

just the recipe

what I was looking for

The formula for dessert in my household is fruit-and-a-bribe, and I'm always on the lookout for new fruits, new bribes, and new combinations.

what I made

A variation on Alice Waters's poached pears, from The Art of Simple Cooking, page 192, using:

• underripe rather than ripe pears
• scored rather than peeled pears
• halved rather than whole pears
• sour cherry juice, a product new to me

chit-chat

Poaching pears (and many another fruit) comes naturally to me, I've been doing it for years, and you'd think by now there would be no new ideas, but even so simple a concept can take shape in many, many different ways.

The idea of using the pears underripe rather than ripe came from Simon Hopkinson's Second Helpings of Roast Chicken (Ebury, 2006, pp. 178-179). After recommending frosty-cold canned pears with frosty-cold evaporated milk (yum), he says:

If you want to cook pears from raw, then buy them rock-hard -- which, I am convinced, is what the canny canners do anyway. An impenetrable pear will always perform, just so long as it is cooked in a balm of sweet and fragrant syrup.

My pear was one notch softer than rock-hard, but not yet ripe. (You have to go by feel with pears. They're ripe when they respond to gentle over-all squeezing. By the time they smell ripe, the flesh is disgustingly over the hill.) And he was so right -- no need to wait till the pear flesh begins to yield, anxiously squeezing, hoping against hope not to smell the heavenly but mortuary aroma that signals the pear has turned to vapid mush. Hurrah for underripe pears.

I hate to abandon the skin of any produce, which is often the treasury of micronutrients with an interesting texture to boot. I've been scoring rather than peeling pears for years, but this time I learned something new. Usually I serve poached pears skin-side up, but this time the insides were so beautiful I served them skin-side down. When it came time to eat them, I couldn't figure out where to spoon. So if I'm serving the pear scored skin down, I have to cross-hatch it rather than scoring it in only one direction.

Half pears rather than whole pears? Fruit-and-a-bribe is supposed to be small, even tiny. That's the way we do it.

The folks at R. W. Knudsen put out a series of single-fruit juices that I'm wild about. Organic Just Tart Cherry is the newest in my pantry, and I plan to keep it always on hand. Now if they would only bring back our favorite, the just plain plum juice ...

Oh, and the final new thing is that I cooked the pears in one of my new non-stick pans as insurance in case I burned the syrup. Burnt sugar bonds no any surface it touches, but maybe not to non-stick.

grades for my version

healthy	B+	The bribe (in this case, the sugar) always keeps fruit‑and‑a‑bribe from being an A.
fast	B	Brief but not hurried.
easy	A	A breeze.
cheap	B	The juice isn't all that inexpensive (worth it, though).
delicious	D	As made, the scored skin ruined the dish; but with that corrected, an easy A.

yield

One pear serves two people.

equipment

   a sharp knife
   a melon baller
   a nonstick cooking pot

the pear

ingredients	Alice	m-c	why?
pears	1 per person	½ per person	weight

   Using your sharpest knife, and exercising the greatest care, lay the pear down on its side and pierce the stem a little bit above the beginning of the flesh. Then draw the knife along the stem, splitting it in half. (If you're not aiming for picture-perfect pears, just lop the stem off and throw it away.)

Set the pear up on the blossom end and cut it in half longways, from the stem end to the blossom end.

   Use a melon baller to remove the core from each half, lifting away any long strings from the core to the stem (some pears have them, some pears don't).

Turn each pear half over and score the skin -- not, as I did, in only one direction, but in two perpendicular directions, making a crosshatch pattern.

the syrup

ingredients	Alice scaled	m-c	why?
liquid	1 cup water	1 cup sour cherry juice	tastier
sugar	5 Tablespoons	5 Tablespoons	no change

   Put the cherry juice and the sugar in your nonstick pan and lay the pears in the pan skin-side up. Bring the syrup up to a simmer and cook the pears till you can pierce them easily with your sharp knife. Let the pears cool to room temperature in the syrup.

Put the pears skin-side down in small bowls.

Turn the heat on under the syrup and cook it down till shiny bubbles develop and burst, develop and burst in quick succession. This is the point at which you can burn the syrup. Whip the pan off the stove and divide the syrup evenly between the pear halves.

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