Baked pears, thickened buttermilk, and fried bread.
On Sunday, I appeared on the Heritage Radio Network, chatting with Carmen Devito & Alice Marcus Krieg of We Dig Plants. We talked all about PEARS! If you haven’t heard the show yet, go here and listen for free. I dug up some pear recipes from the annals of history with the idea that we would pick one to try. Well, we had a difficult time agreeing, so this week I’m going to cook up three very different 19th century pear recipes.
The first was Alice’s pick: Buttermilk soup or “Pop.” This recipe is odd. I’ve never seen a precedent for it: buttermilk is heated, mixed with pears, and poured over fried bread. Check it out:
I needed some buttermilk education, so I naturally turned to that font of knowledge, Wikipedia. I knew buttermilk as the bi-product of butter making: when cream is churned, the result is a solid (butter) and a liquid (buttermilk). I knew that before seperation, fresh milk was often set in a cellar to seperate into milk and cream; what I didn’t realize is that this milk would also ferment because of naturally occuring bacteria. This fermentation is what gives buttermilk its sour taste, although in modern production facilities we artificially inseminate pastuerized milk with a squirt of lactic acid bacteria.
Although the recipe doesn’t explicitly say to make a roux, I think it implies it. The roux will thicken the buttermilk.
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Buttermilk Soup or Pop
From Practical Sanitary and Economic Cooking by Mary Hinman Abel, 1890.
2 cups buttermilk
1 tablespoon flour
2 tablespoon butter
pinch salt
2 large pears (I used Bosc)
1/4 cup sugar (brown sugar would be good; maple syrup if you’re feeling adventurous)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (or spice of your choice)
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pare, core, and dice pears, then arrange in a baking tray (cake pan, etc). Sprinkle with sugar and spice. Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until tender.
2. In a large saucepan over a medium-low heat, heat 1 tablespoon of butter and the flour to make a roux. Cook until flour begins to brown. Add buttermilk and salt, turn heat to medium-high. Bring to a boil while stirring constantly, then turn heat off. Add baked pears to buttermilk mix, stir to combine.
3. Melt remaining butter in a small skillet and fry two slices of bread. Remove to a plate and top with pear/buttermilk mixture.
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The original author of the recipe warns that cooking buttermilk “brings out the acid,” but I found the taste of the finished product to be surprisingly mild, either as a result of being cut by the fat of the butter or the sweetness of the pears. And frankly, I was skeptical of this recipe, and it was not my first pick to make. But I was delightfully wrong: this is the perfect snack. It’s like a delicious warm yogurt treat (tastes better than it sounds): the dairy was filling, the pears sweet, and when poured over hot, buttery bread, it’s just the right amount of food. Highly recommended, four stars, etc. etc. Try it.
On a completely unrelated note, I wrote this post jamming to my friend Gregg Gillis’ (Girl Talk) new album All Day, available for download for FREE. It is really, REALLY good.
well-buttermilk biscuits are damn good, so I figure this would be too – kinda like a cobbler….
I am now so hungry.
I think you would like this, bryan. It’s like an old fashioned Cottage Double.
Grew up eating buttermilk pop. It has some similarities to your version but either way it got me craving it. I think I will make it tomorrow. We always had it with raisens and sometimes barley but most important you had to serve it with dark corn syrup. That was the way the local Dutch made it.
That’s so interesting; I did know it was a regional dish. Where are you from?
Botermelk pap. I grew up eating this. Not a fan.
Do you have a recipe for this? I’m looking for one to make for my dad who says my grandmother used to make it. Thanks!
Jody [email protected]
Our granny did buttermilk pop thus:
combine one or two eggs with enough flour to make a thick dough
bring a quart of buttermilk to a seethe.
drop chunks of the dough into the buttermilk.
when all the chunks float, serve with brown sugar.
a weird treat, but we think it’s yummy!
Sounds *really* good! I think I’m going to try it!
I gave this a try on my tumblr blog: http://fourpoundsflour.tumblr.com/post/23417039783/recipe-buttermilk-pop
I talked to an older lady in the grocery store today in South Dakota she was buying buttermilk for Buttermilk soup. we visited about it, I had never heard of it, she is from Germany, said they make it with raisins and pears, or you can use apples too. my ancestors are Germans from Russia but I never had this before.