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Dessert

Stewed Pears and Rice

A dish of stewed pears served over cooked rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and rice work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 93 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stewed Pears and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel the pears evenly and cut them in half.

  2. Use a jardiniere scoop to remove the cores from each half pear.

  3. Arrange the pear halves in a stewpan, leaning them against each other to form a circle.

Stew and serve

  1. Add enough water to cover the pears and sweeten with sugar to taste.

  2. Cover and simmer until the pears are tender.

  3. Meanwhile, cook the rice according to package instructions.

  4. Serve the stewed pears over the cooked rice.

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. Pear + ricetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Sugar + ricetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking pears
Soften during simmering and become tender, sweet fruit that holds its shape.
Rice
Provides a neutral starchy base that soaks up the pear cooking liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the poaching liquid, which is absorbed slightly by the pears.

Swap the pear

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rice. 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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