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Dessert

Pear Water Ice

A frozen dessert made with pears, lemon juice, syrup, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pear 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 ↓

Pear Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Add the syrup and water, then mix well.

  3. Rasp the pears into the mixture and combine thoroughly.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve to remove solids.

Freeze and shape

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid, then shape it like a pear.

  2. Cover the molds with paper before placing them in the ice.

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. Lemon + peartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Syrup + peartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together254 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + syruptop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavor that balances the sweetness of the syrup.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point so the ice stays softer and easier to scoop.
French pears
Provide the main pear flavor and aroma of the water ice.

The step that matters

Passing the mixture through a fine sieve. Sieving removes the pear solids and fibers. Without it, the frozen ice would be grainy and less smooth on the palate.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, pear. 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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