The mystery pear
Or, the best secret pie you can make.
When I was old enough to ride in a grocery cart and consume solid food, but not quite old enough to distinguish proper behavior or to remember anything, I’m told I consumed a pear that Mom had put into the cart with the intention of buying before she could stop me. I presume that I started eating the pear and Mom resignedly let me finish, because the damage had already been done, but she pulled up to the checkout with a pre-toddler covered in juice and a pear skeleton. They reached an arrangement where they weighed another pear twice (this was back in the spring-scale, pre-computer days so making it work required actual math) and Mom had a funny anecdote about my lack of restraint with fruit.
My grandparents had a pear tree, but you couldn’t really snatch a fruit from the branches and eat it, because dental work costs a lot of money, and I wasn’t born with beaver-like incisors capable of shearing small saplings through the force of my bite. At the same time, Grandma’s pear pies were amazing—those rock-hard pears kept their crispness inside the pie (and became considerably less rock-hard) but absorbed all the spice and sweetness from the pie-making process. Clearly, these weren’t the same fruits that I had purloined from the produce bag; I barely had teeth during my criminal days, pears that you measured with a durometer weren’t (and still aren’t) the ones on the store shelves.
So what is this mystery pear? We always called them “sand pears,” but googling “sand pear” yields a species of Japanese Pear (pyrus pyrifolia) that’s quite different from the picture you see above. Apparently, if a Japanese Pear and a common pear love each other very much, they produce an offspring called the Kieffer Pear that thrives in the Southern climate. (The trees grow on the grounds of Andrew Jackson’s home near Nashville.) The fruit drops on the ground and rots most of the time, because if it’s put in the produce section, folks would bring it back, talking about how they broke their teeth.
Cooking, of course, solves that problem, and Kieffer pears stand up to robust cooking where most supermarket pears will turn to mush, which is why you don’t see many pear-filled baked goods on the market.
The other problem is availability. Kieffer pears are hard to find (because of the aformentioned hardness problem), unless you sneak around farmers’ markets in early September and ask the vendors when the fruit is coming in. The search, however, will pay off in surprised looks from your diners who think they’re getting an ordinary apple pie instead of magic.
You might have noticed a trend in “local cuisine” and “farm to table cooking” in your town. Now is a good time to check their bonafides. Do these restaurants have a pear anything on the menu right now? If they don’t, there’s a good chance their “farm” is a big honkin’ warehouse of frozen vegetables. Go ahead and continue to eat there if you like; of course charlatans and poseurs can still be excellent cooks.
The platonic ideal of Kieffer pear recipes is clearly a pie. It’s like an apple pie for courageous people, people who deserve only the best in pies. Firm,juicy pears, threatening to spill out of the crust and make a delicious mess of the plate, taunting you and that scoop of ice cream you added.
Kieffer Pear Pie
6 cups Kieffer pears, peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch pieces.
1 tbsp lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
4 tbsp flour
2 tbsp bourbon
1 pie crust (top and bottom)
Preheat oven to 425°. Mix pears, lemon juice, sugar, spices, flour, and bourbon in a large bowl. Pour into bottom crust, lay top crust on top, cut some slits into the top, crimp the sides, bake in the oven for about an hour on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil (it’s likely to spill over). Let cool for at least an hour if you can manage it. Serves 8.
