Recommendations
Fried pear and Stilton with Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry
On the plate are pear halves that are first caramelised and then filled with Stilton, ginger and walnuts, in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese. Set against this is a cream: a blended sherry with residual sugar, which catches the salty sharpness of the blue cheese.
From the shelf
The bottle
Harveys Bristol Cream has existed since 1882, is made in Jerez de la Frontera and, since the redistribution of the old sherry houses, is a brand of González Byass. According to the Consejo Regulador a cream is a blend: an oloroso is mixed with Pedro Ximénez in an operation called cabeceo, so that the wine ends up with between 115 and 140 grams of residual sugar per litre. Harveys blends four sherries here, namely fino, amontillado, oloroso and Pedro Ximénez, each ageing separately in the solera system for between three and twenty years; the final wine has an average age of about seven years. The bottle is 17.5 percent ABV and comes in 75 centilitres.
The combination
Why this works together
Stilton is a blue cheese made from full-fat cow's milk with at least 48 percent fat in the dry matter, and its flavour comes not only from the mould but above all from salt and fat together. A dry wine loses out against that combination, because the salt makes the wine seem bare and bitter. A cream does have that residual sugar, and the effect is measurable: Green and colleagues found in 2010 that saltiness in mixtures can be suppressed by up to 84.5 percent, while sweetness itself barely yields. The sweetness in the glass therefore softens the salty side of the cheese instead of fighting it. Add the pear, whose caramelised cut surface has already half built the bridge to the wine, and the walnuts, which pick up the nutty notes from the oloroso in the blend. The Consejo Regulador explicitly mentions blue cheeses with cream.
At the table
The dish
- For 4 people
- Ready in 45 minutes
- Type cheese course
What you need
- 4 hand pears, halved
- 50 g light brown sugar
- 20 g butter
- 100 g Stilton
- a quarter teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 2 pieces of ginger in syrup, very finely chopped
- 60 g walnuts, finely chopped, plus a few extra
- a handful of rocket or watercress
How to make it
- Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Halve the pears and remove the core with a melon baller.
- Melt the butter with the brown sugar in a frying pan. Place the pear halves cut side down in the pan and let them caramelise for a few minutes.
- Put the pears in a roasting tin and bake them in the oven for twenty minutes. Let them cool slightly and scoop out most of the flesh so that the outside stays whole.
- Finely chop the scooped-out flesh and mix it with the Stilton, the nutmeg, the ginger and the walnuts.
- Fill the pear halves with the mixture and put them back in the oven for another ten minutes, until the cheese starts to melt.
- Let the pears cool briefly and serve them with the rocket or watercress and some extra walnuts.
In the glass
Serving
Serve this cream between 10 and 12 degrees, the temperature the Consejo Regulador prescribes for this style. A white wine glass or a catavinos of about 200 millilitres works well, filled one third. A cream is a blended sherry and not a fino: once opened it keeps for about two months, with the bottle closed and stored cool.
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