Roasted spiced pears with wild honey mascarpone

Biting into a pear so often involves cruel disappointment; you have high hopes for juicy, yielding flesh only to end up with the taste of floury turnip. The problem is that there’s no real way of telling what mood pears are in when you buy them. Skin colour provides no reliable clues; a rosy blush is more a marker of variety than of ripeness, and vivid green often conceals the sweetest softest flesh. A gentle squeeze while the grocer has his back turned may well tell you if they’re ripe, but ripeness can go hand-in-hand with grittiness. And while it’s possible to ripen hard pears in a warm kitchen, they seem to turn from rock to mush the moment my back is turned. It’s a dilemma for pear-loving folk.

The truth about pears

Of course, it helps enormously to buy UK-grown pears when they are at their seasonal peak, from September through to October. Although it is possible to continue to buy UK pears early into the new year, these will have been held in oxygen-depleted storage which diminishes their flavour. There’s a terrific article at countryfile.com which discusses this.

As with so much of what we eat, we probably just expect too much of pears. This gorgeous fruit has been grown in the UK for hundreds of years, but because we demand them all year round, we now import 80% of all the pears we eat. This has meant that over half of UK pear orchards have been destroyed in the past 30 years and just three of the hundreds of varieties in existence dominate our orchards. This means that most of the pears we eat are likely to have been treated with nasty post-harvest chemicals - designed to cling to the fruit during transportation - to satisfy our taste for pretty, shiny fruit. (I must admit I knew little of the detail of this until I browsed the website of Sustain, the alliance dedicated to better food and farming policies, and to promoting greater understanding about what we eat).

Spiced roasted pears with wild honey mascarpone cream

So, if you have fallen out of love with pears, of if you have some lurking in the fruit bowl which you know to be hard and horrid, I urge you to try this recipe. Eaten on their own, the roast pears could be viewed as mildly virtuous, but served with a puff of mascarpone cream, this is actually very decadent. I had a terribly hard time tearing myself away from the bowl it’s so delicious. Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 4 pears (I used Conference)
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 3 tablespoons soft light brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla paste (or the seeds scraped from 1 vanilla pod)
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 2 whole cardamom seeds
• 25g butter
• 250g mascarpone
• 250ml double cream
• 2 generous tablespoons wildflower honey, or other floral honey