Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Pulp for Ices

A pear pulp made by cooking pears with water and lemon, sweetened with sugar, used for making ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pear Pulp for Ices

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel, core, and slice the pears.

  2. Place the pears in a preserving pan with water and lemon juice.

  3. Heat on the stove until the pears soften.

Make the pulp

  1. Drain the pears and return them to the heat in a copper pan.

  2. Cook until reduced to a pulp.

  3. Add 3 ounces of pounded sugar for each pound of pulp.

  4. Steam for 30 minutes.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar 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 bulk of the pulp, giving it body and fruit flavor once cooked down.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the pulp and helps preserve it, adding body to the finished mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pear flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar by weight of pulp. Sugar should be weighed against the cooked pulp, not the raw pears. Reducing the fruit first changes its weight, so measuring after cooking keeps the sweetness and texture in the intended proportion.

Swap the lemon

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes