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Dessert

Pear Sweetmeats

Pear Sweetmeats are pears stewed in water, optionally with lemon or ginger, then cooked in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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.

Prepare the flavourings

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

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

Make the syrup and finish

  1. Make a syrup by boiling ¾ cup sugar in ½ cup of the water used to boil the pears.

  2. Once the syrup is boiled and skimmed, add the pears and boil until clear.

  3. If using lemon, squeeze the juice into the syrup and boil with the pears.

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. Sugar + gingertop 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).

Sugar and ginger 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
Soften into tender flesh and take on the sweet syrup as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and thickens the water into a syrup that the pears cook in.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma to the syrup (optional).

The step that matters

Boil the pears in the syrup until clear. As the pears cook in concentrated sugar syrup, the sugar slowly replaces water in their flesh, making them look translucent. Stopping too early leaves them opaque and less sweet, while overboiling can break them apart.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, ginger. 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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