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Dessert

Pears

Stewed pears with powdered sugar, lemon juice, and rind, served chilled.

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

Why it works: Pear and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the pears in half and peel them neatly.

  2. Remove the cores and place the pears in a stewpan.

Stew

  1. Add the powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon rind, and a little water.

  2. Set the stewpan over a very slow fire and stew until the pears are tender.

Cool and serve

  1. Once tender, transfer the pears to a basin and let them cool before serving.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 and turns tender during slow stewing.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pears take on a rich, syrupy flavor as they stew.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the pears' color fresh.

The step that matters

Stewing over a very slow fire. Gentle heat softens the pears evenly without breaking them apart. Fast boiling can make the fruit mushy and cause the syrup to reduce too quickly, so check for tenderness rather than relying on time.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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