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Dessert

Pear Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking sliced pears with sugar, vinegar, and lemon until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Combine pears, sugar, vinegar, and lemon in a pot.

  2. Boil until the mixture reaches the desired thickness.

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. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Pear + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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

  5. 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 bulk and fruity flavor of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens and thickens the preserves as it dissolves and concentrates during boiling.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that complement the pears.

The step that matters

Boil until the desired thickness. Sugar and fruit pectin set as water evaporates, so boiling too briefly leaves the preserves runny, while overcooking makes them stiff and can scorch the sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, sugar, vinegar. 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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