Name: Preserved Pears
Ingredients: Pears; Water; Sugar (1 pound for every pound of pears); Lemon (1 sliced for every pound of pears)

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

Pears
Water
Sugar (1 pound for every pound of pears)
Lemon (1 sliced for every pound of pears)

Directions

Prepare the pears

Leave pears whole or cut in half lengthwise, removing the stem.
Weigh the pears.
Boil the pears in just enough water to cover until tender.
Remove the pears from the water.

Make the syrup

Make a syrup using the boiling water, adding 1 pound of sugar for every pound of pears.
Boil the syrup for 1 hour.
Add the pears and 1 sliced lemon for every pound to the syrup.
Boil gently for 40 minutes.

Jar and finish

Transfer the pears to jars.
Boil the syrup until thick.
Pour the thick syrup over the pears.

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.

Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together942 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,079 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
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: Form the main body of the preserve, softening as they cook until tender.
Sugar: Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup as it boils down.
Lemon: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps balance the sweetness.