Skip to main content
Dessert

Pear Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling pears with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Put the pears into boiling water and let them boil for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the pears from the water and peel them.

  3. Cut the pears into pieces.

  4. Return the pieces to the fire and boil until tender.

  5. Pass the cooked pears through a colander using a wooden pestle.

  6. Weigh the pulp.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add 12 oz. of sugar for every pound of pulp.

  2. Clarify the sugar.

  3. Boil the sugar until it reaches the 'little crack' stage.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Add the pulp to the sugar and mix well.

  6. Return to the fire and boil until it reaches the same consistency as apricot marmalade.

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 bulk of the pulp, along with natural pectin and flavor that set the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it thickens on boiling, helps it set to a spreadable consistency.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the 'little crack' stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before the pulp is added. Too little boiling leaves it thin, and too much makes it hard and crystallized, so the marmalade will not set properly.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes