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Dessert

Preserved Pears

A method for preserving pears in sugar syrup, optionally flavored with lemon.

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 ↓

Preserved Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the pears thinly.

  2. If using large pears, cut them into halves or slices for quicker cooking.

  3. If the pears are hard, parboil them until tender before adding to the syrup.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a pot, combine 1 cup of water and 1 pound of sugar to make a syrup. Boil until clarified.

  2. Add the pears to the syrup and simmer gently until tender.

  3. For extra flavor, insert a clove into the blossom end of each pear.

  4. Optionally, add the juice and thinly pared rind of 1 lemon for every 5 pounds of fruit.

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 that softens and becomes tender as it simmers in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until tender. Vigorous boiling can break up the pears and make them mushy. Gentle simmering lets the syrup penetrate the fruit evenly and soften it without falling apart.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. 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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