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Pears Baked and Canned

Pears baked in a pan and canned with a brown sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Pears Baked and Canned

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wipe the pears clean and prick each with a silver fork.

  2. If the pears are very large, cut them in half lengthwise.

  3. Place the pears in a baking pan with a little water in the bottom.

  4. Make a syrup by combining 1 cup of brown sugar with 1 pint of water.

Bake and can

  1. Bake slowly at 300°F (150°C) until tender.

  2. Once the pears are done, place them in cans and fill with hot syrup.

  3. Seal the cans immediately.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pear + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together254 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. 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

Pears
Form the main body of the preserve, softening into tender fruit when baked slowly.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the syrup and adds a deeper, caramel-like flavor to the pears.

The step that matters

Seal the cans immediately. Filling with hot syrup and sealing right away keeps the contents hot and helps create a vacuum as they cool, which is needed for safe shelf storage.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pearthe original
  4. Apricotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup. 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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