Felicity Cloake’s perfect poires belle Hélène. Photograph: Robert Billington/ood Styling: Flossy McAslan. View image in fullscreen Felicity Cloake’s perfect poires belle Hélène. Photograph: Robert Billington/ood Styling: Flossy McAslan. How to cook the perfect ... Food How to make the perfect poires belle Hélène – recipe Cool, juicy pears, cold ice-cream, hot chocolate sauce and a crunchy garnish – the perfect pudding
Felicity Cloake Sun 18 Oct 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 18 Oct 2026 14.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I t’s always slightly embarrassing to realise that you’ve missed a pop culture reference, even if it’s 162 years old, so I won’t dwell on the fact that until last week I was unaware of the existence of Offenbach’s 1864 operetta about Helen of Troy, La Belle Hélène , after which today’s dish is named. In any case, the great French chef Escoffier was so moved by it, or perhaps by its popularity among Parisian diners, to name this simple dessert of vanilla-scented poached pears topped with hot chocolate sauce after the work’s heroine, played by the comely Hortense Schneider.
Though other homages (he includes no fewer than five dishes with that name in his 1907 Guide Culinaire , none of which involve pears) may, like the music, have faded from public consciousness, this particular pairing, if you’ll forgive the pun, has stood the test of time. As Nigel Slater observes in Tender: Volume 2, “The marriage of pears and chocolate is extraordinary. It is as if they were made for each other.” This, I think, is the duo at its “most sumptuous”.
View image in fullscreen Max Rocha poire belle helene: an ’intensely flavoured but thin sauce’. Thumbnail pics by Felicity. Everyone is agreed that, for best results when poaching pears, you need them to be firm. As Nigella Lawson writes in How to Eat, “In fact, it is a positive advantage to use what would in other circumstances seem rebarbatively firm fruit” (extra points if, unlike my spellcheck, you were already familiar with the word “rebarbative”). Squidgy fruit of the kind that runs down your chin will fall apart during cooking; turn those into cake instead .
As far as I can tell from the recipe included in François-Régis Gaudry’s magisterial Let’s Eat France , which claims to have respected “the proportions of the era”, Escoffier poached the fruit in a vanilla syrup, a tradition most versions honour. However, Max Rocha of Cafe Cecilia in London eschews the pod in favour of citrus zest (lemon and orange), rosemary and a stick of cinnamon. (Also, to be fair, Rocha, like Slater , does not claim to be making poires belle helene, but simply poached pears with chocolate sauce). Very nice it is, too, and I would encourage you to experiment, but, out of deference to the dessert’s creator, I’ve stuck with vanilla.
Under-ripe pears tend to be willing recipients of help in the flavour department, so for once I’m in favour of dialling up the sugar, because the pears need to be robust enough to stand up to the intense chocolate sauce. I’ll also be adding the juice of a whole lemon, as Jane Grigson and chef Alain Benech, whose recipe is featured on Delia Smith’s website , suggests. I’ll include the finely grated zest, too; the acidity not only helps the fruit retain its colour, but brings out its perfume as well.
View image in fullscreen Flaked almonds: Alain Benech’s poire belle helene. Though everyone uses a slightly different cooking method, from a brief boil ( Grigson’s F…