Elizabethan pear conserve

ELEANOR BARNETT cooks up a colourful, sweet fruit dessert cherished by Tudor folk during the cold days of winter

- Eleanor Barnett

Pears included in Elizabethan recipes are typically 'wardens' - hardy varieties that must be cooked before eating, their flesh blushing with a red hue and softening into buttery deliciousness. Tudor doctors recommended that wardens cooked with sugar, spices and wine be eaten at the end of a meal. Warden pies, such as those mentioned in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale - “I must have saffron to colour the warden pies,” japes the clown - were commonly eaten as a festive treat.

Some have deduced from the name that warden pears must have been introduced to Britain by the Cistercian monks of Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire, but it is more likely that they were imported centuries earlier by the Romans. The name instead likely comes from the Anglo-Norman word warder, meaning 'to keep'. That’s because wardens, which are harvested in the late autumn, lasted well over the winter months - an important quality in an age before artificial refrigeration. As I explore in my book Leftovers