Skip to main content
Drink

Pear Preserves

This recipe preserves pears by cooking them with sugar and water until they reach 220°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and halve the pears.

  2. Blanch the pears in boiling water for 5 minutes.

Cook

  1. Place the pears in a kettle with the water and cook until soft but not mushy.

  2. Add the sugar and cook until the mixture reaches 220°F (104°C).

  3. Avoid slow cooking to prevent the pears from turning pink.

Process

  1. Process for 40 minutes at 180°F (82°C).

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

Pears
Provide the fruit body and flavor, softening as they cook into a spreadable texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the preserve set and keep.

The step that matters

Cook the sugar to 220°F (104°C). The sugar must reach a high enough concentration for the preserve to set and keep well. Stopping early can leave it runny and more prone to spoiling, while cooking it too long can make it tough and overly thick.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes