Pears Stewed Purple

Time for a test run of the first receipt (recipe)! I was at the store and grabbed a couple of winter pears. Aren’t they pretty? Too bad I didn’t research them until I got home. Red pears have only been around for 20 years.

Good enough for a test run, anyway …

Pears Stewed Purple

Pare six large winter pears, and either quarter them or do them whole: they make a pretty dish with one whole, the rest cut in quarters, and the cores taken out; lay them in a deep earthern pot, with a few cloves, a piece of lemon-peel, a gill of red wine, and a quarter of a pound of fine sugar; if the pears are very large, they will take half a pound of sugar, and half a pint of red wine; cover them close with brown paper, and bake them till they are enough.
Serve them hot or cold (just as you like them), and they will be very good with water in the place of wine.To Stew Pears in a Sauce pan put them into a sauce-pan with the ingredients as before; cover them and do them over a slow fire; when they are enough take them off, add a pennyworth of cochineal, bruised very fine.

- Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

I pared them, sliced them into eighths, put them in a saucepan and covered them with a sweet red table wine, cloves and lemon peel. Since the wine was sweet, I went a little easy on the sugar.

I tried a slice of pear and … meh. Not much flavor at all. So I set them to stew. Still meh. And stew. And after two hours, they were most certainly “enough” and I had very flavorful pear slices. They were also most definitely purple. (I didn’t even need to use the cochineal.)

 

This one looks like it will be a keeper.