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Dessert

Ginger Pears

A preserved pear dessert flavored with ginger, lemon, and orange.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ginger Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ginger into thin slices.

  2. Press out the juice of the lemons and oranges, and cut their rind into shreds.

  3. Peel the pears and cut them crosswise into slices.

Cook the preserve

  1. Add enough hot water to the sugar to dissolve it.

  2. When hot, add the lemon juice, orange juice, ginger, lemon rind, and orange peel.

  3. Lastly, add the pears and cook slowly for 3 hours.

Jar and store

  1. Place in pint fruit jars and seal.

  2. Keep in a cool, dry place.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + peartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

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

  5. Orange + peartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the bulk of the fruit, becoming tender as they cook slowly in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it dissolves, forms the thick syrup that preserves it.
Preserved ginger
Adds warm, sharp spice that flavors both the syrup and the pears.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the pears slowly. Pears can break down into mush if the syrup boils hard for a long time. A gentle simmer lets them soften while keeping their shape and the syrup thick.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, lemon, orange. 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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