APPEARANCE Rating: 
Nice yellow and red skin, gets lots of bruises though so be gentle.
AROMA Rating: 
Full and fragrant, sultry pear.
TEXTURE Rating:
Perfectly firm but giving; slightly grainy, like most pears.
TASTE Rating:
The quintessential pear – nothing detracting but nothing I would go on about either. At least it doesn’t have the papery skin or a bitter aftertaste.
OVERALL Overall Rating:
This is a prissy person’s pear. It tastes very good but doesn’t drip juice all over you (though there is plenty of juice, don’t get me wrong). It discolors easily so there is value in taking great care when transporting it or it will look like the morning consequences of a late night brawl. Also it is normal enough that assuming you haven’t bruised the hell out of it, no attention will be drawn when you slice and eat it with a fork and knife. It’s everything someone uptight needs in an afternoon snack.
FRUIT
Pear
VARIETY
Bartlett
PEAK
Fall-Winter
GROWN
Unknown
PURCHASED
Grocery Store
NOTES
I was about to dismiss this pear as forgettably normal, when I came across this article. Apparently the Bartlett is the same as the Williams Pear, which is the very pear that is used for Williams Pear Schnapps, aka “au de vie of poire williams”. (Don’t I just sound so much more impressive when I say it in French? Yes, I am also currently wearing a tiara.) So of course this immediately caught my cocktail loving attention. Unfortunately, every site I found explaining how to make pear liquor of one kind or another requires crazy things like meat grinders and hammers, growing pears inside a glass bottle, or having access to something called “acid blend“. Fun? Yes. Gonna happen? No. Let me know if you give it a whirl. In the meantime I will be checking out all the pear cocktails on this dedicated pear cocktail blog. And you thought a site about fruit was a narrow niche. Au contraire.
RECIPES
Butternut Squash and Bartlett Pear Soup
Bartlett Pear Muffins (this is an entire site dedicated to pears!)
while I lovelovelove pears, the delicate nature and bruise-ability of the bartlett makes me love it a tiny bit less… but I do appreciate the lack of mess, since I quite often forget my napkin. I like your analysis of this one… and great links.
Meagan – if you lovelovelove pears, you definitely need to hunt down the Xinjiang Fragrant Pear. Sometimes (not all the time, but just enough to keep you coming back for more) they smell like roses.