How to make the perfect poached pears

I worry about pears. I won’t claim that their fall from grace keeps me up at night, but sales have been in decline for decades, and occasionally I fret that future generations will never know the sticky sweet joy of biting into a soft ripe fruit and feeling its honeyed juice pour down their chin.

Partly, of course, they are a victim of their own delicious squidginess; a perfectly ripe pear is far too delicate a beast for the modern supply chain, which explains those crunchy hand grenades of fruit sold “for ripening at home”. Turn your back, however, and those same obstinate rocks will immediately collapse into a mushy puddle in the bottom of the fruit bowl; as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed, there are only 10 minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat, and if you don’t happen to be there, napkin at the ready to mop up the perfumed juice, then you have missed your moment.

The solution: cooking. The pear is one of those rare fruits that are as delicious cooked as they are fresh. Soft and yielding, with an intense, almost banana-like sweetness, a poached pear, crimson with wine and fragrant with spice, makes a decadent but strikingly simple dessert, and a welcome respite from the heavier puddings we stuff ourselves with at this time of year.

The fruit

Like apples, you are unlikely to find a great deal of choice in most supermarkets and greengrocers, though farmers’ markets may yield more unusual treasures. The two most common British-grown varieties are conference, the elongated deep-green kind with russet speckles, and comice, the squatter, yellow sort with smoother, butterier flesh, though you’ll also come across the concorde, a cross between the two, and the lovely voluptuous williams. Personally, I prefer the smoother sort of pear for cooking; the rougher texture of conference is less pleasant warm. comice or williams would be my top choice here.

None of the recipes I try specifies a particular type of pear, however; they are more focused on the ripeness of the fruit, which should, according to Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, be hard – or at least, “not quite ripe” as Lindsey Bareham and Simon Hopkinson put it in the Prawn Cocktail Years. Craig Claiborne in the New York Times International Cookbook goes as far as “firm ripe”, but I find fruit that is ready to eat has an unfortunate tendency to disintegrate under heat. Indeed, Elizabeth David goes as far as to boast her recipe, in French Provincial Cooking, will make “the most cast iron of cooking pears very delicious”.

They should be peeled before cooking, but the stalk left on for appearance’s sake. Bareham and Hopkinson cut the end of the core out to leave a “small triangular hole” while Jamie Oliver’s book Jamie’s Kitchen, French chef Anne de Ravel and Claiborne all trim the base to allow the pears to stand upright. This is a good idea in theory, but requires a very small, deep cooking vessel of the type most ordinary people are unlikely to have. Lying the fruit down in the pan is a far easier way of cooking them, so a flat base is unnecessary unless you would like to serve them standing up.

Cutting out the core helps the fruit to cook through, and also saves the guest from scooping it up by mistake. The chewy core is not the pear’s finest hour.

The cooking medium

Though recipes abound for cooking pears in everything from perry to earl grey tea, here I have limited my investigation to the classic red wine version, though the same principles apply to any liquid. To my mind, the deep, rich, slightly tannic flavour is the perfect foil for the sweetness of the pears, and also makes for an impressive visual contrast, the outsides of the fruit stained like Homer’s wine dark sea (the pear is nothing if not a poetic fruit), the flesh a delicate pale green.

Bareham and Hopkinson believe “it is well worth searching out a decent bottle of fruity red wine in which to cook these pears. A beaujolais, or at least something made with the gamay grape, is going to be the most suitable”. Oliver specifies a barolo or an amarone, rather annoyingly given I’m unable to find a bottle of either for under £15. Claiborne uses port diluted with water, and de Ravel, who explains that she often finds “red wine too commanding with pears”, cuts it with “the clear, warm touch of brandy”. The thrifty David uses a mixture of half wine, half water.

Financial considerations aside, I don’t think the tannins in barolo or amarone make them the best choice here (if you can run to a bottle, drink it with a meaty main course instead), and while the acidity of the beaujolais is welcome with the sugar, it’s pronounced a little thin by my testers. Port, however, proves sickly sweet once reduced. A straightforward fruity red, with low tannins, and a hint of acidity, will do nicely.

Adding water, as David suggests, produces a bland, underwhelming result; better to spend less on the wine, and use it all.

The sauce

In any case, the best results come from those recipes – Oliver, Smith, Bareham and Hopkinson, and de Ravel – which reduce the cooking liquid before serving, intensifying the flavours. (The last two recipes also simmer the cooking liquor for 20 minutes before adding the fruit, but this seems counterproductive, because it means there is not enough liquid to submerge the pears in as directed.)

Smith stirs in some arrowroot at this point, which though it makes the sauce appealingly shiny, also gives it an off-putting jellied consistency my testers are faintly repulsed by. They are keener on the creme de cassis Bareham and Hopkinson add however, which, in the clever way of blackcurrants, manages to supply both sweetness and acidity. You could also replicate this with a squeeze of lemon juice, and then adjusting the sugar to taste if you don’t happen to have any cassis in the house (though I would highly recommend investing in some at a future date: it’s magic for turning bad white wine good).

Oliver melts a great lump of butter into the sauce at the end, to give “a really intense, tasty sauce which is to die for”. In general, you can’t get a big enough lump of butter for me, but here it gives the dish a richness I don’t think it needs. (It also means you have to eat it warm, before the butter solidifies unattractively around the fruit.)

Flavourings

Sugar is obviously a must, though I tend towards Bareham and Hopkinson’s more modest amount than the rather intense sweetness of Claiborne’s version. A rather festive touch of spice is also popular, and David’s tastes very dull without such adornment.

Everyone else uses cinnamon, which feels like a good match with the pears, as do Bareham and Hopkinson’s cloves, though no one picks up their peppercorns, to my disappointment. Vanilla, also used by Smith and Oliver, tastes cloying to me, but fans enjoy the flavour, so I have included it as an optional extra. The savouriness of Oliver’s thyme divides opinion – I like it, and once I am finally sick of mulled wine (probably around 2 December), I will be trying it on its own with sugar, and perhaps a curl of lemon peel.

Citrus is another key flavour here; almost every recipe contains orange or lemon zest (I favour the latter for its useful bitterness) and Oliver adds some orange juice too, though this gets lost in the welter of sweet spiced wine.

Cooking

David, Smith and Oliver bake their pears; David in a “very slow” oven overnight, Smith at 130C for three hours, and Oliver at 190C for a mere hour, which seems to work just fine and gives more even results than those who poach theirs in a pan. The main problem with these stovetop recipes is that few of them allow enough liquid to cover the fruit, which means turning the pears during cooking, and results in a less than attractive variegated appearance.

It also proves difficult to keep the heat steady and gentle enough, so I would recommend the oven for best results, though as pears vary so dramatically, it’s important to keep checking them towards the end of cooking so you catch them at the perfect moment – the moment that makes you wonder why you don’t eat pears more often. Job done, as far as I am concerned.

The perfect poached pears

(serves 4)

1 x 750ml bottle of soft, fruity red wine
125g granulated sugar
2 cloves
1 stick of cinnamon
1 strip of lemon zest
1 vanilla pod, split (optional)
4 hard, squat pears, preferably comice or williams
Creme de cassis or lemon juice to taste

Heat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Put the wine in a pan with the sugar, spices and zest and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar.

Meanwhile, peel the pears and cut out the core at the base, but leave the stalk intact. Find an ovenproof dish just wide enough to hold the pears in one layer and lay them in there.

Pour the spiced wine over the top - it should just cover the fruit - and cover. Bake for about an hour, checking after 45 minutes; once the fruit is tender to the point of a knife, but still holds its shape, lift it out of the liquid and set aside.

Pour the liquid back into the saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce by about half until syrupy, then taste and pour in the creme de cassis or add lemon juice to taste (if the latter, you may wish to add a little sugar too). Pour the sauce back on to the pears and serve warm or cool (I like them chilled) with creme fraiche, thick yoghurt or ice cream.

Why have we fallen out of love with pears, what are your favourite varieties, and how do you like to eat them, if not standing over the sink? And, can a fruit-based dessert ever compete with the big boys, or would your face fall like a five year-old’s if someone served you this and called it pudding?