A surprisingly easy to make snack!
While this dish is both decadent and delicious, the recipe is as simple as poaching a few pears and blending together a simple sauce! The only hard part is the waiting you have to do before you can dig in! Poached pears go well with any number of different sauces, glazes, or syrups, so if raspberries aren’t your thing, you can always try out any other fruit sauce, or even chocolate if you so desire!
Poached pears?
While finding any true origin of a dish is hard to do, the concept of pears in syrup appears as early as the early 15th century listed as “Wardonys in Syryp” [1]. The recipe itself could and probably does date further back, perhaps even to roman times [2], but the main concepts stand; poach the pears and serve with some sort of dressing! This specific recipe comes from a catering company called Lobecca that operated in the Madison area from the 1980s to the year 2000, in an internal booklet of many of the key recipes that were offered by the catering company throughout the years [3].
A pear in sauce.
Ingredients
- 6 pears
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 4 cups of water
- 1 cup raspberries
- 1/2 cup orange juice
- 2 tablespoons lime juice
Steps
- Peel pears and cut a thin slice off the bottom of each pear.
- Place pears upright in a large saucepan and add water and lemon juice.
- Bring to a boil, lower the heat to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes.
- Drain saucepan.
- Place pears in a baking dish and let chill in refrigerator for 3-7 hours.
- Place ingredients for sauce in a food processor or a blender, and blend for 30 seconds.
- When serving, spoon raspberry sauce over and around individual pears.
References
[1] T. Austin, in Two fifteenth-century cookery-books. 1888
[2] “Nova online | secrets of lost empires | roman bath | real roman recipes | pear patina,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/roman/patina.html [accessed Oct. 28, 2024].
[3] Lois, Rebecca, The women of lobecca. 2000