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Dried Pears

This recipe dries russet pears in a sugar syrup by boiling and oven baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Dried Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel the russet pears and cut off the stem ends.

  2. Place the pears in a pan of water.

  3. Boil gently until they yield to your touch.

  4. Remove the pears with a skimmer and transfer them to cold water.

Make the syrup and simmer

  1. In a separate pan, dissolve 2 pounds of sugar in 3 pints of water and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.

  2. Cover the bottom of the pan with pears and boil for a moment.

  3. Transfer the pears to an earthenware pan.

  4. Repeat the boiling process with the remaining pears in batches.

  5. Let the pears cool.

Dry and store

  1. Place the pears stem side up on gratings, slightly flattening them without crushing.

  2. After baking bread, place the gratings in the oven for several hours.

  3. Before each rebaking, dip the pears in the cold syrup and return them to the gratings, repeating up to four times.

  4. Arrange the dried pears in boxes with layers separated by paper, and store in a 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. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Russet pears
Provide the fruit that softens, concentrates in flavor, and dries into the finished product.
Sugar
Sweetens the pears and, as syrup, coats them to build sweetness and help preserve them.

The step that matters

Boil the pears gently until they yield to the touch. Boiling too hard can break the pears apart before they are tender, while underboiling leaves them firm and slow to absorb syrup. Gentle heat softens the fruit's cell walls evenly so it keeps its shape while drying.

“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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