Last fall’s editions of A la Carte passed without a pear story, not because I don’t like pears (I love them, in fact), but because I couldn’t think of a new angle to put on a topic the Mail Tribune covers multiple ways multiple times throughout the year.
This year, though, I knew the food pages probably needed to acknowledge the Rogue Valley’s chief fruit. So I started early, filing away recipes for pears whenever I ran across them on the Associated Press wire. But I still didn’t have what reporters refer to as the news “hook,” the story’s reason for being.
Enter the Rogue Valley Growers and Crafters market, which I typically make a point of visiting every Thursday. A Gold Hill grower was handing out samples of a tiny pear that I assumed was a runty specimen of one of the valley’s common varieties. When she told me it was called a Seckel pear, I suspiciously wondered if she was just inventing a back-story for her fruit.
Yet once I tasted the Seckel, I was hooked, convinced people needed to read about this amazingly sweet pear. Imagine my disappointment when she said it was the last day she would bring the fruit to market because her crop had frozen on the tree.
Feeling like my pear story would never come together, I did what reporters often do in a bind — wander around in hopes of stumbling across something interesting. Mail Tribune photo editor Bob Pennell and I ended up at the Southern Oregon Sales Pear Station, resigned that at least there’d be pears to photograph. And lo, and behold, there were the Seckels.
Compared with other pears, Seckels are so cute that they fairly beg to be brought home. Forget that they cost about $1 per pound. I bought a couple pounds and passed them around the newsroom to gauge the reaction. Sure enough, most of the staff had never seen them despite the fact that Medford has long been a premier growing area. And the paper’s archives turned up only five references to Seckels in the past 15 years.
Ultimately, taste won me over. The Seckels were juicy but not so soft that they dripped all over. And a slightly thicker skin kept juices in even after the pears sat around for several days on the kitchen counter.
The thicker skin also makes Seckels good travelers, growers said. Given that, I’ll definitely pick up a few pounds to take to family on the coast this Thanksgiving. I’m betting the Seckel’s reception will be worth its extra cost.
