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Baking

Baked Pears

A baked pear dessert cooked with water, brown sugar, and a dough cover.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Baked Pears

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Baked Pears

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash the pears and leave the stems on.

  2. Place them in a two-quart stone crock with ½ cup of water and ½ pint of brown sugar.

  3. Cover the crock with a piece of dough (made from coarse flour and water) rolled to about ½ inch thick, or use the stone cover.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for two hours or more, depending on the ripeness of the fruit.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  3. Pear + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together485 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the fruit that softens and turns tender as it bakes.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a caramel-like flavour as it dissolves into the syrup.
Coarse flour and water dough
Forms a lid that seals the crock so steam stays in and cooks the fruit.

The step that matters

Sealing the crock with dough. A tight seal traps steam around the pears so they cook through in their own juices. A gap lets steam escape, so the fruit can dry out and bake unevenly.

Swap the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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