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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A preserve made by cooking pears with white and brown sugar, lemon juice, and lemon rinds until tender.

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

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, combine white sugar and brown sugar to make a thick syrup.

  2. Add the quartered pears to the syrup.

  3. Squeeze the juice from the lemons and add it to the pot.

  4. Add the lemon rinds to the pot.

  5. Cook until the pears are tender and the syrup thickens.

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 + 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 fruit body that softens during cooking and becomes tender in the syrup.
White sugar
Dissolves into a thick syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps it set as it cooks.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavour to the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the sugars.
Lemon rinds
Contribute aromatic oils that add citrus fragrance to the preserves.

The step that matters

Cook until the pears are tender and the syrup thickens. Cooking must continue until the syrup reaches a thick consistency, because sugar concentration rises as water evaporates. Stopping too early leaves a thin syrup that will not set properly, while overcooking can make the sugar too stiff and the fruit overly broken down.

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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