Baking and Books: Pear Crisp and The Strange Woman

I just used my Peach Crisp recipe and subbed pears for the peaches and reduced the sugar a bit. Easy!

Pear Crisp

Topping:
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly-grated nutmeg
¼ pound unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

Filling:
2 lbs pears, peeled, halved and seeds and stems removed
¼ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon freshly-grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon non-GMO cornstarch

Preheat oven to 350˚ Fahrenheit. In a large mixing bowl, stir together flour, ½ cup sugar, salt and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg. Rub in the butter until topping mixture resembles lumpy oatmeal. Set aside.

If the pears are firm, halve again. Otherwise, place halves in an 8” square baking tin and cover with ¼ cup sugar, ¼ teaspoon nutmeg and cornstarch. Stir to combine. Spread topping evenly over pears and bake in the middle of the oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or until topping is a nice golden color, but not browned. Serve hot or cold.

6 generous servings

Download printable copy

*****

Not that they really have anything in common other than sharing a similar palette, but I still want to talk about my interlibrary loan! The Strange Woman by Ben Ames Williams became a movie shortly after its release. It's quite possible the book really was "talked of in a Whisper!" It's quite scandalous--sadism, murder, incest, pre- and extra-marital sex, prostitution...all going on within the realm of the temperance movement in 1830s Bangor, Maine. You may suspect (particularly if you've read/seen Leave Her to Heaven) that Ben Ames Williams didn't have a very high opinion of women. In the last chapter of The Strange Woman he writes, "Oh, men were fine, sensitive and delicate and tender as no woman would know how to be," and begins the novel with a quote from Proverbs:

For the lips of a strange woman drop honey,

And her mouth is smoother than oil:

But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,

Sharp as a two-edged sword.

The quotations are apt; Jenny Hager is one nasty piece of work. She makes Scarlett O'Hara look like Mother Theresa. I'd already seen the movie, so I thought I knew what to expect--boy howdy, was I wrong. First off, the movie doesn't follow the book very closely at all and, secondly, the book is much more lascivious. Makes for fun reading, right? I was actually surprised by how absorbing The Strange Woman turned out to be. I wanted to know what Jenny would do next!

Be sure to watch the film* before you read the book so you won't be aggravated. The movie version suffers from the prudery of the production code, but whoever did the casting did a great job (if only the film had a dialog coach!). Hedy Lamarr (Jenny Hager), Gene Lockhart (Isaiah Poster), Louis Hayward (Ephraim Poster) and George Sanders (John Evered) are all a good fit for their respective characters. Ah, what might have been!

*Download free at Internet Archive
All Strange Woman photos are from Doctor Macro.

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