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Dessert

Pear Sweetmeats

Pear Sweetmeats are pears stewed in water, then boiled in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pear Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Pare, halve, and core the pears.

  2. Cover the pears with water and stew gently until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. If using lemon, cut the rind into long, thin strips and boil in clear water.

  2. If using green ginger, scrape it and boil with the pears.

  3. Make a syrup by boiling ¾ pound of sugar with ½ pint of the water used to boil the pears.

  4. Skim the syrup, then add the pears and boil until clear.

  5. If using lemon, squeeze the juice into the syrup while boiling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the main fruit, which softens when stewed and turns translucent in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, when boiled into syrup, helps the pears become clear and glossy.

The step that matters

Boil the pears in the syrup until clear. Boiling the pears in sugar syrup lets the sugar gradually replace water in the fruit, which makes it look clear. Stopping too early leaves the pears opaque, and boiling too hard can break them apart.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, ginger, sugar):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, ginger, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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