No one ever talks disparagingly about anything going apple-shaped, and pears even come second in Cockney Rhyming Slang. Poor pears just aren't as cool and popular as apples.
To describe it as the apple’s retarded cousin would be unduly harsh but you could be forgiven for thinking that the pear has been runner-up to its fellow pomaceous fruit since the Garden of Eden.
It’s hard to imagine a world where The Beatles and Steve Jobs would have fought a long running legal battle over the right to the ‘Pear’ trademark, no one ever talks disparagingly about anything going apple-shaped, and pears even come second in Cockney Rhyming Slang. Poor pears just aren’t as cool and popular as apples.
But that’s not always been the case. Various ancient civilisations considered the pear a far superior fruit to the apple. In China until the end of the Sung dynasty (AD 1279) there was only one known variety of apple and copious varieties of pears. It was a similar story in classical Greece and in Rome where Pliny the Elder recorded 41 types of pear and far fewer varieties of apple.
Although the Doomsday Book of 1086 refers to pear trees as boundary markers in England, cultivated pears were not introduced to Britain, from France, until the 16th century. The French popularised the pear throughout Europe during The Middle Ages, while the Belgians perfected it by breeding around 400 new and improved varieties.
By the late 19th Century there were around 700 varieties of pear in Britain. Today 90% of British pear production is given over to the Conference Pear, which first appeared on the scene in 1885.
British pears should be an autumnal treat, in season from September to early January but today they sit in the apple’s shadow, particularly in terms of supermarket shelf space, because they are delicate and difficult to store.
The great English apple geek Edward Bunyard remarked that while it is ‘the duty of an apple to be crisp and crunchable, a pear should have such a texture as leads to silent consumption.’
A perfect pear at its peak beats any apple, its subtle, soft, sweet, fragrant flesh melting in your mouth; its ester-like perfume lingering on your lips. Sadly such specimens prove as elusive as rocking horse excrement and the typical supermarket pear tends to be either bullet-like or – after you’ve left it to ripen – a disheartening gritty mush. So the news that they’re working on ‘super-cooled’ pears that will sit on supermarket shelves all year round should leave you – if not British growers - lukewarm.
Also worth your attention: