I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Recently, I tried a Pear and Gruyere pie. The pear part was good, but the gruyere wasn't up front enough for my liking. In fact, I couldn't even taste it. However, that pie got me to thinking about matching savory cheeses and fruit pies. Cheddar cheese on apple pie, is a classic pairing, for instance, and there are probably others.

But ... pears and a savory cheese sounded like a good idea, and I had some pears and some Jarlsberg ...

• one pie crust, made or purchased in your usual fashion
• about a quart of pears, around 2-3 cups when cored and cubed
• 2 Tbs lemon juice
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 cup honey
• a pinch of salt
• 4 eggs
• 12 oz grated Jarlsberg cheese

Put it into the pie shell and bake at 350F for fifty minutes to an hour. Ideally, you want the cheese to melt and the eggs to set, but not for the crust to burn. So check on it at fifty minutes and then keep an eye on it.

This makes for a pretty cheesy and somewhat runny pie. If you don't want quite such an aggressive cheese element, throttle back the cheese by as much as half.

Naturally, cheese choice will affect the outcome as well. I used Jarlsberg, which plays well with the pears, but quite a few other cheeses would also work - gruyere, for instance, or almost any Swiss-style cheese. For that matter, sharp cheddar might be interesting. I'd recommend against anything too mild, though, since the point of the exercise is the contrast of flavors.

If you don't want the pie to be quite so runny, then either add another egg or add a few tablespoons of flour to the mix before adding the cheese. Or both, of course.

This pie can be served warm, and is also good reheated, even nuked to within an inch of its life. I topped it with maple butter, and that was pretty darn good. With this cheese-to-pear ratio, the pie itself is quite savory, so a little more sweet on top is not a bad idea. If you've reduced the cheese, your mileage may vary.