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Dessert

Another Wat to Stew Pears

A dish of pears stewed in water with brown sugar, cloves, and port wine, served hot or cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Another Wat to Stew Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and quarter the pears, removing the core, and place them in cold water.

Stew

  1. In a saucepan, combine the pears, brown sugar, cloves, and cover with cold water.

  2. Cover the pan tightly and stew gently until the pears are red and tender.

  3. Just before serving, add the port wine.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold, with cream.

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 + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Pear + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Clove + port winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  5. Sugar + port winetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking pears
Provide the fruit that softens and turns tender during gentle stewing.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a caramel-like depth to the cooking liquid.
Port wine
Adds aroma and fruity flavour, added late so its character is not cooked away.

The step that matters

Stew gently with the pan tightly covered. Gentle heat in a closed pan softens the pears evenly and turns them red without breaking them apart. A hard boil can make the fruit mushy and the syrup cloudy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, port wine. 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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